Anaerobic Treatment of Sulfite Pulp Mill Effluents

Abstract

Sulfite pulping will still play an important role in Austria in the foreseeable future. Therefore, efficient and economic means of waste-water treatment have to be searched for. The experience gained with operating laboratory scale and semi-technical scale experiments for anaerobic treatment of condensates and the extraction stage effluent from two mills is presented. As we foresee, in full scale conditions a series of problems arise (neutralization, solids retention, SO2 toxicity, start-up of process) The advantage of the anaerobic process in terms of energy alone cannot, as we had to realize, be the single basis of the investment decision.