Membrane bioreactor (MBR) performance in fish canning industrial wastewater treatment

The fish canning industries produce a large amount of wastewater. The high-strength wastewater from fish processing industry is of great concern worldwide. This type of wastewater is rich in organic matter and have high total dissolved solids (TDS). The elimination of salts is usually expensive and, on the other hand, the high salinity and the seasonal variation of the effluent characteristics make the removal of organic matter difficult using only the biological process. For this purpose, the use of a membrane bioreactor (MBR) process combining both a biological treatment and ultrafiltration membrane separation could be a perfect option for fish canning wastewater treatment. In this work, the performance of a membrane bioreactor process is investigated to treat the fish canning industry wastewater. The removal efficiency of important parameters such as chemical oxygen demand (COD), five day-biological oxygen demand in (BOD5), total suspended solids (TSS), nitrate (NO3-), total Kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN), orthophosphate (PO43-) and TDS are followed. Experimental results show that the overall removal efficiencies obtained are: 96.6% for COD, 98% for BOD, 99.5% for TSS, 90% for nitrate, 96% for TDS and greater than 97% for TKN and PO43-. These results confirm that combination of both biological treatment and membrane process is regarded as an effective approach to reduce the contaminants in fish canning wastewater. Membrane bioreactor presents several advantages in terms of water resource protection because of the great quality of the treated water that can be reused.