A new fashion season results in a flood of new fabrics in a variety of colors. With the beauty comes the reality that producing these textiles comes at a cost to the environment as heavy polluting dyes find their way into the textile industry’s wastewater.
Anew water clean-up technology, developed as part of an EU-funded project, could help the fashion industry clean up its act. The new Sequencing Batch Biofiltration Granular Reactor (SBBGR) helps remove the most polluting textile dyes components – so-called recalcitrant organic compounds – by breaking them down using ozone treatment before applying an innovative wastewater bio-filtering technique.
Benefits of the SBBGR are that it integrates biological treatment with a chemical oxidation treatment, based on ozone, while physically separating these two steps.
Unlike traditional biological systems, this novel biological treatment filter relies on microorganisms growing in aggregates and is separated from the basin containing ozone and the waste. The wastewater is poured over the microorganisms, which process pollutants, and each aggregate holds up to 10 times more microorganisms than conventional technologies.
This new system produces 80% less sludge than traditional biological ones. Sludge is reduced because microorganisms only just survive in these conditions without being able to reproduce. However, there are some negative aspects to the new technology which need to be investigated further; it is expensive to run and consumes a lot of electricity. One of its main positive attributes when faced with competing available wastewater treatment technologies is its ability to be scaled up.