Remediation of Industrial Effluents

Environmental pollution has become the greatest problem of mankind in the recent times. The level of pollutants especially in water is increasing day by day causing a grave danger to all the living entities. The industrial effluent has been identified as a major polluting agent of the water resources. Various industries utilise water in cooling, processing, transportation and heat treatment. The water gets mixed with various harmful chemicals during these processes and forms a harmful effluent which is directly discharged to rivers by these industries. This effluent contaminates the water resources and soils affecting the human, animal and plant life in a large scale. Hence, the remediation of industrial effluent before discharging into the environment becomes essential. Various physical, chemical and biological processes are being utilised to provide a complete remediation or remediation to an extent where it could be discharged safely or could be reused. This chapter involves a complete explanation of all the processes with their advantages as well as disadvantages. Many of the above-mentioned industrial applications discharge complex organic compounds in the form of effluent which is very difficult to degrade by using conventional methods such as photoreaction. Hence, a catalyst-based photoreaction called photocatalysis is utilised by many researchers for the degradation of such complex organic compounds, present in wastewater. The metal oxide semiconductors (MOSs) such as titanium dioxide (TiO2), tin dioxide (SnO2) and zinc oxide (ZnO) have been used as catalyst for the dye degradation of industrial wastewater.