Laundry water reclamation using sustainable ceramic membrane from waste marble dust: Performance, fouling analysis

The rapid increase is urbanization and emerging economies led to overexploitation of water sources. Although agriculture and industry account for more than 60% of total water consumption, the domestic sector contributes substantially to wastewater generation, with nearly 50-80% of discharged wastewater originating from household activities. The ever-increasing population and urbanization directly relate to increased laundry activities, which in turn produces huge amount of wastewater. In this study, a sustainable, waste derived ceramic membrane is used for the treatment of laundry effluent. The use of ceramic membrane coupled with gravity driven dead end filtration setup makes the process overall cost effective. The performance analysis of the membrane was done on the 2 front, pollutant removal and fouling control. The membrane showed a substantial reduction of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), microplastics (MPs), and turbidity of 88 %, 98 %, and 99 %, respectively, while operating at subsequently low pressure of 0.05 bar. The COD and MPs concentration were found to be 1265 mg/L and 2.88 × 10⁶ pieces/L. The reduction of COD from 1265 mg/L to 145 mg/L was observed, which gives the acceptable standard for non-potable purposes. At the same time, membrane shown excellent anti fouling properties with 81 % of flux recovery ratio (FRR). The study revealed that the membrane fouling was dominated by the combined effect of the complete pore blocking and cake filtration. The high pollutant removal, added with excellent antifouling properties, makes the fabricated ceramic membrane a good candidate for the treatment of laundry effluent with end water ready for non-potable purposes.