Treatment of polluted river water by a new constructed wetland

A new constructed wetland was built to purify one polluted river in Taiwan, and this study was conducted to evaluate the treatment efficiency of the wetland. Due to the very limitation of available budget, several water quality items, which were stipulated by Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration for rivers, in the influent and effluent of wetland were analyzed and evaluated. These items included water temperature, pH, DO, BOD5, TSS, and NH4+-N. The results showed that the average removal rates of total (unfiltered) BOD5, TSS and NH4+-N were 36.9 %, 71.8 % and 47.1%, respectively. With the HRT more than 3.4 days, the wetland could treat the polluted river water effectively. Longer HRT in this wetland appeared no obvious improvement on the removal rate of TSS or NH4+-N. However, BOD removal rate increased while the HRT (Hydraulic Retention Time) increased to about 5 days. In this wetland, the calculated mean first-order reaction rate constant (kT) for BOD5 was 0.15/day with a standard deviation of 0.13/day and for NH4+-N was 0.24/ day with a standard deviation of 0.18/day. It is also concluded that there is a linear proportional relationship between BOD concentrations in the effluent of wetland and its influent mass loading rates, with the coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.6511. Similar result was seen for NH4+-N as well, with the coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.5965. TSS removal rate was found to be linearly proportional to its influent mass loading rate, with the coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.4875.