Preliminary Study: Treatment Of Food Industry Wastewater Using Two-Phase Anaerobic Treatment System

Food industry wastewater is well known for its high concentration of COD and suspended solid. The condition of the wastewater formed makes it illegal for the industry to release the wastewater to the open body of water without proper essential treatments. The study is conducted on wastewater produced by a food processing company which specializes in chips export business. A two-phase anaerobic treatment systems involving UASB and HUASB reactors as primary treatment and followed by AF reactor as secondary treatment are proposed. In this study, the performance of UASB-AF (R1) and HUASB-AF (R2) was monitored, and the effectiveness of palm oil shell as support media was evaluated as well. Parameters measured are pH, COD, NH3-N, oil and grease and total phosphorus (TP). The instruments used for collecting data in this research are pH meter and HACH DR5000. It was found that the highest COD removal for the effluents from the R1 system, R1-U and R1-AF were on day 14 with 93.6% removal and on day 62 with 96.6% each. Meanwhile, in the R2 treatment system, the highest COD removal for the effluents from the R2-H and R2-AF were on day 14 with 98.3% removal and on day 110 with 97.6% removal. This study has generate useful findings that could be applied to alleviate the current problem at the food factory and also at other food industry in the future.