Ultrafiltration treatment of detergent solutions

Abstract

Increasing water consumption for both industrial and domestic purposes has resulted in rapid deterioration in water quality. It is leading to a shortage of surfaceand groundwater resources and to rise in costs of water and wastewater treatment. A rational water management should secure the purest water sources for direct human consumption and force to reuse process water for industrial application [1]. The environmental risk of detergent effluents associated with manufacture, use and disposal of these chemicals is of a great interest. The high and varied pollution loads of these effluents are mainly due to the residual products in the reactor, which have to be washed away in order to use the same facility for the manufacture of other products. The majority of detergent products reach the environment with domestic and industrial wastewater. Detergent effluents can cause significant environmental problems because detergent product and its ingredients can be relatively toxic to aquatic life. Membrane-based separation processes may be an attractive alternative to wastewater treatment methods, which are based on physical–chemical processes, i.e., coagulation [2], foaming [3], advanced oxidation processes [4,5] and adsorption onto different types of activated carbons [6] and polyelectrolytes [7]. The processes — because of the selectivity of the membrane — create the possibility of recovering resources and process water as well as of reducing high organic load of the wastewater.