Environmental and Health Hazards of Textile Industry Wastewater Pollutants and Its Treatment Approaches

Abstract

Textile industry wastewater (TIWW) causes serious water and soil pollution. TIWW has high pH, biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), total dissolved solids (TDS), total organic carbon (TOC), solids suspended (SS), total solids suspended (TSS) sulfate, nitrate, and chloride. It also has a variety of recalcitrant chemicals like dyes, detergents, salts, phenol, and metals like arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), and chromium (Cr), which cause serious threats in the environment and severe health hazards in human/animals. Textile dyes are well known for its highly toxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, and genotoxic effects on living beings. Physicochemical methods are not efficient for the removal of TIWW due to the requirement of expensive chemicals and the production of a large amount of sludge as a secondary pollutant. Whereas biological methods use different classes of microbes and plant species for the removal and treatment of dyestuff and wastewater. Combined and membrane treatments are highly effective methods for the degradation and detoxification of textile wastewater. This chapter provides an overview of the textile industry, wastewater generation, and environmental pollution. Further, toxicity profile and bioremediation methods for degradation and detoxification of TIWW are also explained in this chapter.