Constructed Wetlands for Tannery Wastewater Treatment in Portugal: Ten Years of Experience

Abstract

Wastewaters from tannery industry are complex in composition and providing adequate treatment can be difficult. Constructed wetlands (CW) are regarded as an alternative treatment to the conventional biological systems, as a developing cost-effective and environmentally friendly phytoremediation technology. The present review compiles and integrates information on CWs technology for the needs of the tannery sector. The following issues arise as crucial for the implementation of such systems, namely i) an accurate wastewater characterization and an effective pretreatment before reaching the CW, ii) choosing the plants species better adapted to the imposed conditions, iii) substrate selection and iv) range of organic loadings applied. The examples practiced in Portugal give indication that horizontal subsurface flow systems, with expanded clay media, are a suitable option to be considered when dealing with high organic loading tannery wastewater (up to c.a. 3800 kgCODha−1d−1), being resilient to a wide range of hydraulic variations. Plants such as Phragmites and Typha have shown to be adequate for tannery wastewater depuration, with Arundo donax proving resilient to high salinity wastewaters. The flexibility of implementation allows the CW to be adapted to different sites with different configurations, being suitable as main secondary or tertiary treatment stage.