Wastewater screening method for evaluating applicability of zero-valent iron to industrial wastewater

This study presents a screening protocol to evaluate the applicability of the ZVI pretreatment to various industrial wastewaters of which major constituents are not identified. The screening protocol consisted of a sequential analysis of UV-vis spectrophotometry, high-performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC), and bioassay. The UV-vis and HPLC analyses represented the potential reductive transformation of unknown constituents in wastewater by the ZVI. The UV-vis and HPLC results were quantified using principal component analysis (PCA) and Euclidian distance (ED). The short-term bioassay was used to assess the increased biodegradability of wastewater constituents after ZVI treatment. The screening protocol was applied to seven different types of real industrial wastewaters. After identifying one wastewater as the best candidate for the ZVI treatment, the benefit of ZVI pretreatment was verified through continuous operation of an integrated iron-sequencing batch reactor (SBR) resulting in the increased organic removal efficiency compared to the control. The iron pretreatment was suggested as an economical option to modify some costly physico-chemical processes in the existing wastewater treatment facility. The screening protocol could be used as a robust strategy to estimate the applicability of ZVI pretreatment to a certain wastewater with unknown composition.