Purification and Reuse of Poultry Slaughterhouse Wastewater with Membrane Technology

The conventional wastewater treatment methods used at poultry slaughterhouses which produce large amounts of wastewater face many challenges, especially the inability of recovering valuable nutrients and reusing treated water. In the last few years several researchers turn to membrane technology due to its enormous advantages over conventional methods. In this research a sequential membrane process of ultrafiltration (UF), forward Osmosis (FO) and reverse osmosis (RO) is proposed to treat semi-processed poultry slaughterhouse wastewater (PSWW) and to recover and reuse the water. The pretreatment of PSWW with UF removed 36.7% of chemical oxygen demand (COD), 38.9% of total phosphorous (TP), 24.7% of total solids (TS), 14.5% of total volatile solids (TVS), 27.3% of total fixed solids (TFS) and 12.1% of total nitrogen (TN). The PSWW was treated with FO membrane in FO mode, pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) mode, and L-DOPA coated membrane in the PRO mode. All these modes achieved complete removal of COD and TP. However, the FO mode showed the highest pollutant removal efficiency; 90.5% of TS, 85.3% of TVS, 92.1% of TFS, and 37.2% of TN. The FO mode achieved the highest average flux 10.4±0.2 L/m2-h. Since the FO mode showed the highest removal efficiency of pollutants and highest average flux, the FO mode was optimal for treating PSWW. The FO mode permeate was further treated by RO membrane to separate the filtrate from the draw solution and purify the PSWW for reusing it in the poultry industry. The RO significantly removed the COD, TS, TVS, TFS, and TP. However, the TN was reduced by only 62% because of the high ammonia concentration present in the draw solution. Overall, the sequential membrane process (UF-FO-RO) removed most of the pollutants from PSWW and produced water that could be reused for industrial poultry processing purposes.