Water quality characterization procedures for poultry slaughterhouse treatment systems

Abstract

Water scarcity necessitates wastewater treatment. Overall, slaughterhouses generate a large volume of wastewater with a wide range of organic matter. This wastewater is characterised by the presence of a high concentration of chemical oxygen demand (COD), total suspended solids (TSS), fats, oil, and grease (FOG), and proteins. This can be said also for poultry slaugh-terhouse wastewater (PSW). The PSW has been previously treated utilizing the Static Granular Bed Reactor (SGBR) and Expanded Granular Sludge-bed Bioreactor (EGSB) as sole treatment systems. Therefore, the performance evaluation of an integrated multistage lab-scale system for the treatment of PSW as investigated in the present study, is required. The system included an Eco-flushTM dosed bio-physio pre-treatment unit for FOG hydrolysis before the PSW is anaerobically in EGSB and SGBR linked to membrane bioreactors. This was a new design concept, therefore, quality tools, i.e. capability indices (Cp, Cpk, Pp, and Ppk) were used to monitor the potential performance of such a multi-stage lab-scale plant. The current design indicated a comparable performance as compared to previous studies for the removal of alka-linity, COD, FOG, SS, and TDS. Results indicated an overall performance of the SGBR in terms of alkalinity, COD, FOG, SS, and TDS removal efficiency being 75%, 88%, 83%, 54% respectively. As CPIs are an option for evaluating performance efficacy, the individual units in the multistage process, and the whole integrated process have shown that they can perform to the point where Pp and Ppk is equivalent to unity, reducing some water quality parameters by upto 99% in some instances for individual units. Even though Cp and Cpk were less than 1 at one point in the process, it was demonstrated that such an approach produces high-quality treated PSW, meeting environmental disposal specifications.