New filter system cleans composting facility wastewater without chemicals
Mahichi N, Najafpour-Darzi G, Hosseini M
Composting
The liquid that leaches out of large-scale composting operations is a pollution headache, and a cheaper, low-energy way to clean it up means more composting facilities can operate responsibly near water-scarce or sensitive areas.
When municipal solid waste is composted at large scale, it produces a smelly, contaminated liquid called leachate that has to be treated before it can go anywhere near a river or stream. Researchers in Iran built a two-part cleanup system: spinning disks covered in bacteria that eat pollutants, paired with a specially coated filter that catches what's left. The combo removed almost all the ammonia, heavy metals, and cloudiness from the leachate using very little electricity and no added chemicals, though it still needs a final polishing step to meet strict discharge standards.
Key Findings
Adding the coated microfiltration module boosted ammonia-nitrogen removal from 70.4% to 93.9% and achieved over 99.9% reduction in suspended solids and turbidity
The system removed 96.3% zinc, 91.8% barium, 84.6% manganese, 79.0% iron, and 62.0% calcium without any chemical dosing
The chitosan-PEG coated filter maintained stable flow above 25 L/m²·h for over 120 days without needing chemical cleaning, using only about 0.4 kWh per cubic meter treated
chevron_right Technical Summary
Engineers built a two-stage system combining rotating biological disks with a specially coated filter membrane to clean up nasty liquid runoff from a composting facility, removing over 90% of ammonia and most heavy metals without using chemicals.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Hybrid treatment of landfill leachate using rotating biological contactors and membrane filtration.
A novel hybrid process combining a 3-stage rotating biological contactor (3-RBC) with a chitosan-PEG-coated polypropylene microfiltration (MF) module was developed and validated for treating leacha...
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