Brine Recycling from Industrial Textile Wastewater Treated by Ozone. By-Products Accumulation. Part 1: Multi Recycling Loop

Abstract

The “reactive” dyeing of textiles requires an application of low-molecular-weight salts (LMWS), such as NaCl or Na2SO4, as necessary auxiliary agents. LMWS acts only as a remediation factor and remains in the dyeing effluents constitute brine. The main goal of the presented study was to investigate the application of ozone technology for industrial textile wastewater highly polluted by LMWS. The study was divided into two parts. In Part 1, by-products accumulated during multi-recycling of the same wastewater was investigated. While Part 2 was devoted to the scaling up of ozonation process, Part 1 concerns the efficiency of textile wastewater ozonation carried out as a repeatable process. The sequence of wastewater treatment and textile dyeing was repeated four times in a closed loop using the same process water. Although the wastewater decolorization was efficient in the subsequent ozonation cycles, some adverse effects, such as an increase in chemical oxygen demand (COD) and self-buffering at pH 9.5–10.0, were suggested the accumulation of by-products. The preliminary detection of by-products by thin layer chromatography (TLC) revealed phenol and naphthol derivatives as the transformation products (TPs) of ozonation. Dyeing of cotton using purified wastewater (brine) resulted in very good DECMC color matching parameters (under 1.16), but only in the first recycling loop, and then the TPs affected the process.