Treatment and reuse of wastewater from the textile wet-processing industry: Review of emerging technologies

New ecolabels for textile products and tighter restrictions on wastewater discharges are forcing textile wet processors to reuse process water and chemicals. This challenge has prompted intensive research in new advanced treatment technologies, some of which currently making their way to full-scale installations. These comprise polishing treatments such as filtration, chemical oxidation and specialized flocculation techniques and pre-treatment steps including anaerobic digestion, fixed-film bioreactors, Fenton's reagent oxidation, electrolysis, or foam flotation. Though several of these new technologies are promising in terms of cost and performance, they all suffer limitations which require further research and/or need broader validation. A segment of the research deals with the separate handling of specific sub-streams such as dyebath effluents to which membrane filtration is sometimes applied. The main limitation of this approach is the treatment of the concentrate stream. The spectrum of available technologies may, in the future, be further broadened to include fungi/H2O2-driven oxidation, specialized bio-sorptive processes, solvent extraction, or photocatalysis. (C) 1998 SCI.