Chemical treatment of textile wastewaters: statistical characterization, colour and sulfide removal

One of the major problems encountered in the textile industry is production of highly colored large volumes of wastewater. It is often not possible to predict the characteristics of textile wastewaters by using reported values in the literature because every textile industry is unique with respect to the type of production and the technology and chemicals used in production. Furthermore, the concentrations of pollutants in textile wastewaters vary according to the wastewater management practices and amount of water used in the production. In the first part of this study, wastewater characteristics of a cotton mill textile industry were determined by using the normal and log-normal II distribution functions for flow, COD, TOC, pH and colour. These parameters were measured in the effluent of the equalization tank and the statistical fits were evaluated by using the chi-Square test. It was found that flow and TOC values fitted normal distribution; COD values fitted log-normal II distribution. On the other hand, pH and colour did not fit in to aforementioned distributions. In the second part of this study, the treatment of textile wastewater by coagulation/flocculation/precipitation (CFP) was investigated. Lime, iron and aluminum salts with anionic polielectrolite combination were used as coagulants. Aluminum salts and the combination FeSO4 + lime + polielectrolite were used to remove the colour from mixed textile wastewaters, successfully. On the other hand, FeSO4 + lime + polielectrolite was more effective than aluminum salts to remove the colour from wastewater of indigo dyeing process. In the third part of this work, the removal of sulfide arising from indigo dyeing was investigated. Sulfide removal was accomplished by chemical oxidation and catalyzed air oxidation and removal efficiencies up to ninety percent were found. Chemical oxidation using sodium hypochlorite resulted in color removal too; however, dosages of hypochlorite have to be carefully monitored in order to avoid toxic effects of excess chlorine in water.