Membrane and Adsorption Processes for Removing of Organics and Inorganics from Urban Wastewaters

Since in Kosovo there are still no water purification plants and untreated wastewaters are discharged in environment, in this paper we've studied methods for removing of different organic and inorganic pollutants from Kosovo urban wastewaters. For best results we've used two methods, reverse osmosis and adsorption. For reverse osmosis, all samples were pretreated with coagulant (FeSO4) and flocculant (CaO) and then treated with reverse osmosis membranes. For adsorption, we used Kosovo coal ash and bentonite, both natural and low cost adsorbents. The analysis of experimental results shows that removing of organic and inorganic pollutants by reverse osmosis was very effective and removed from 93-98% of organics and almost 100% of heavy metal ions. Efficiency of coal ash in removing organics from natural waters was from 88-95%, while the efficiency of bentonite was 77-88%, while removing of heavy metal ions by coal ash was from 79-100% and by bentonite was from 50-92% respectively.