Principles and Mechanism of Adsorption for the Effective Treatment of Palm Oil Mill Effluent for Water Reuse

Abstract

Most of the wastewater, especially palm oil mill effluent (POME), is toxic to the health of humans, environment and the aquatic ecosystem. This has become a major challenge to water quality managers due to the economic and technical expertise required to process these wastes before discharge, either to the water bodies or to the environment. POME is a high strength wastewater which contains high concentrations of micropollutants, which cannot be analyzed alone by visual inspection. These substances are very toxic to the aquatic environment due to the accumulation of toxic chemicals which biomagnifies in food webs, they therefore constitute major threat to the aquatic ecosystem. The conventional methods for the treatment of POME has proven to be very expensive for research and with low effective removal efficiencies of the solutes contained in the wastewater. This is because of the high strength of the concentration of the wastewater. Raw POME is acidic and contains chemical oxygen demand (COD) in the range of 15,000–100,000mg/L, average concentration of biological oxygen demand (BOD) which is around 25,000mg/L. Similarly, POME contains high suspended solids and also presence of heavy metals. Some of the conventional methods used for the treatment of POME includes membrane anaerobic system, Fenton-oxidation and evaporation methods. The application of adsorption process is widely used by researchers for varieties of wastewater treatment but it has been rarely reported for the treatment of POME. However, to have effective treatment efficiency using adsorption, there must be clear understanding of the principles and mechanisms of adsorption system to ensure that the proper adsorbents are selected for the adsorption process. This chapter focus on the efficiency of adsorption process by using different types of adsorbent materials for reduction the main pollutants in the POME.