Abstract
The world is facing increasingly more severe water security issues. It has, therefore, become imperative to develop sustainable, eco-friendly water management and recycling techniques. This study assessed the capacity of powdered seeds of Moringa oleifera to improve water quality of effluent from two (2) cassava processing plants in Umudike, Nigeria by measuring the variations in specific physicochemical and microbiological parameters of the samples. The biodegradability indices of the wastewater samples were determined as 0.513 and 0.507 for Plants 1 and 2 respectively indicating samples that were fairly biodegradable and treatable biologically. At the end of the 7-day study, turbidity reduced by 59.6% – 63.2% while chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and total organic carbon values dropped by 66.6% – 74.1%, 86.7% – 88.2% and 67.0% – 72.6% respectively. Correlation analysis showed a strong positive correlation between BO<sub>5</sub> and COD for both Plants 1 and 2. The total heterotrophic and coliform bacteria were completely removed by around day 5 of the study. The observed bacterial isolates in the effluent at onset were Escherichia coli, Bacillus sp., Klebsiella sp., Salmonella sp., Streptococcus faecalis, Shigella sp. and Aerobacter aerogenes. This study confirms the efficiency of powdered seeds of M. oleifera in biotreatment of wastewater from cassava processing plants.
Highlights
Water is an essential element for life with access to quality water considered a fundamental human right
The results from this study indicated that the set-ups with the Moringa oleifera (MO) seed-based coagulant effectively improved the turbidity, total organic carbon and pH levels in the wastewater samples
The Biodegradability Index (BI) obtained for both of the cassava plant MO biomass, this decreased marginally to 94.42% when effluent samples in this study demonstrated high levels of the concentration was raised to 20%
Summary
Water is an essential element for life with access to quality water considered a fundamental human right. Water of good quality is central to ecosystem function and human physiology. Competition for scarce water resources is a major concern such that it is an integral part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It has been reported that the entire volume of usable water on the planet is only about 200,000 km the emphasis on water security, quality and management. The quantity of wastewater generated across Europe and North America is estimated at 67bn m3 annually [3]. In India, an estimated 13.5 billion litres of wastewater is generated daily with over 50% of said volume emptied untreated into the environment [4]. The recycling of wastewater plays a pivotal role in the global water security crisis. It has become imperative to develop safe, sustainable, cost effective and environmentally benign water purification and management approaches
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