Residual micro organic pollutants and their biotoxicity of the effluent from the typical textile wastewater treatment plants at Pearl River Delta

Abstract

This work investigated the biotoxicity and the residual dissolved organic matter (DOM) of the effluents from nine typical full-scale textile plants located at Pearl River Delta (PRD) in Guangdong province, China. The fluorescence regional integration (FRI) analysis showed that the tryptophan-like (II), soluble microbial product-like (IV) and fulvic acid-like substances (III) were the dominant compounds in the DOM. The acute toxicity test showed toxic effects still remained in most textile effluents, which might attribute to the undegraded dyes or aromatic compounds. Combining with the results from multiple methods, it indicated that the selected nine textile wastewater treatment plants (tWWTPs) all contained some residual micro organic pollutants in their effluents, and the residual benzene-derived products or aromatic amines were probably the toxicity-causing substances. Both ozonization and membrane filtration were capable of further decreasing the content of residual DOM, but by comprehensively considering the effects of removing DOM and biotoxicity, membrane filtration was better than ozonization.