Treatment of vegetable oil refinery wastewater by coagulation-flocculation process using the cactus as a bio-flocculant

Abstract

Industrial wastewaters cause severe environmental pollution, and in recent years, much work has been devoted to this topic searching less costly depollution methods. Several biomaterials have recently been explored to be used for the bio-sorption and bio-coagulation-floculation of pollutants from wastewaters. In the last years, there has been an advanced research regarding the use of biological materials in wastewater treatment such as, chitosan, Moringaoleifera, algae, cactus plants etc. The main results obtained in these studies for the depollution of oil refinery wastewaters by using cactus juice, have shown very high removal percentages in the range of (86-99) %, (62-76) % and (67-95) % forturbidity, COD and color removal, respectively, by coagulation-flocculation process. Thus, the biomaterials have proved to be efficient in the pollutant removal, and there for ether is need to explore the scaling up of the reported works, from the laboratory scale to community pilot plants, and eventually to industrial levels.