RECENT ADVANCES IN LEATHER TANNERY WASTEWATER TREATMENT

Abstract

The tannery industry is one of the most important economic sectors in many countries, representing an important economic field also in developing countries. Leather tannery industry is water intensive and originates highly polluted wastewater that contain various micropollutants raising environmental and health concerns. Tannery wastewater is difficult to treat biologically because of complex characteristics like high salinity e high content of xenobiotics compounds. After conventional treatment (i.e., chromium precipitation–primary sedimentation–biological oxidation–secondary sedimentation), effluents still do not meet the required limits, at least for some parameters such as BOD, COD, salinity, ammonia and surfactants. The leather industry is being pressured to search cleaner, economically as well as environmentally friendly wastewater treatment technologies alternative or integrative to the conventional treatment in order to face the challenge of sustainability. The most spread approach to manage tannery wastewater is the steam segregation before conveying wastewaters to in treatment plants that typically include pre-treatment, mechanical and physico-chemical treatment, biological treatment, and treatment of the generated sludge. Thus proper treatment technologies are needed to handle tannery wastewater to remove effectively the environmental benign pollutants. However among various processes applied or proposed the sustainable technologies are emerging concern. This paper, as the-state-of-the-art, attempts to revise the over world trends of treatment technologies and advances for pollution prevention from tannery chemicals and wastewater.

Keywords

• Leather tannery
• Leather tannery wastewater
• sustainability
• innovative treatment technologies
• BOD
• COD