Abstract
A feasibility analysis of tertiary treatment for Organic Liquid Agricultural Waste is presented using filamentous algae belonging to the genus Cladophora sp. as an alternative to chemical tertiary treatment. The main advantages of tertiary treatments that use biological systems are the low cost investment and the minimal dependence on environmental variables. In this work we demonstrate that filamentous algae reduces the nutrient load of nitrate (circa 75%) and phosphate (circa 86%) from the organic waste effluents coming from dairy farms after nine days of culture, with the added advantage being that after the treatment period, algae removal can be achieved by simple procedures. Currently, the organic wastewater is discarded into fields and local streams. However, the algae can acquire value as a by-product since it has various uses as compost, cellulose, and biogas. A disadvantage of this system is that clean water must be used to achieve enough water transparency to allow algae growth. Even so, the nutrient reduction system of the organic effluents proposed is friendly to the ecosystem, compared to tertiary treatments that use chemicals to precipitate and collect nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates.
Highlights
Removal of nutrients from wastewater is very important to maintain the environmental health of aquatic systems
Morphological features and habitat are evidence that the algae belong to the genus Cladophora
The results indicate the optimal dilution rate for the efficient removal of nutrients by Cladophora is Industrial Liquid Wastewater (ILW):Filtered pool water (FW) (25:75) ratio, given environmental parameters such as the ambient temperature of 18 °C and Photosinthetically Active Radiation (PAR) irradiance of 200 μmol photons*m-2*s-1
Summary
Removal of nutrients from wastewater is very important to maintain the environmental health of aquatic systems. Chemical removal of nutrients such as nitrate and phosphate is costly and not environmentally friendly because it requires additional chemicals that generate secondary pollution (Shin and Lee, 1998). Chile has 373 sewage treatment plants but only 8% of the plants have some type of tertiary treatment (Barañao and Tapia, 2004). Plants with this type of treatment are divided into two groups: 65% use biological technologies to remove nitrogen and phosphorus, while 30% use chemicals to remove phosphorus (Barañao and Tapia, 2004)
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