Experimental study on the treatment of urban garment industry wastewater to mitigate groundwater contamination using a solar evaporative still

Abstract

There has been a lot of focus on finding efficient and inexpensive ways to clean up wastewater from industries such as garment processing mills. Since the release of such untreated wastewater leads to the contamination of the groundwater in nearby regions, the treatment of such water has been considered crucial in recent times. The current examination is a laboratory-scale investigation that has attempted to recover freshwater from samples of wastewater collected from three different garment processing mills situated near Tirupur, an industrially developed urban area in south India. An indigenously fabricated solar evaporative still (SES) was employed during the investigations. Beforehand, the groundwater quality in the immediate vicinity of the aforementioned garment processing mills had been assessed in the laboratory. The test results were not favourable and they revealed the deteriorated quality of the groundwater due to the discharge of wastewater from the nearby industries. The experiments with the SES had proved that the mentioned technique could help to generate freshwater from industrial wastewater with acceptable water quality, and its production rate can be expanded if it is scaled to a larger volume.