Environmental

Issues pertaining to abuse of environment and how the present life style could be made more sustainable.

Waste Water Treatment
nitinag@iimahd.ernet.in

Waste waster treatment is an important issue faced by almost every society of the present World. For so many years waste water getting out of various sources like industries etc. had just been made to go out straight to the water resources like rivers etc. but for past half a century or so owing to the threats posed by this there have come various regulations for allowable concentrations of pollutants in water before it can be made to discharge into water reservoirs, and thus there has been an ever increasing need for treatment of waste water to some prescribed level in the discharging unit itself. One of the most important of these pollutants is ‘phenol’. This is because phenols and related compounds are toxic to humans and create an oxygen demand in receiving waters. They are resistant to biodegradation and their presence in water supplies are noticed as bad taste and odour. Also in the presence of chlorine in drinking water, phenols form chlorophenol, which has a medicinal taste, which is quite pronounced and objectionable. Along with this there are various other pollutants giving toxicity and bad odour to water. So these must be removed at any cost. An effective method for this has been established to be use of ACTIVATED CARBON as an adsorbent. And this is the field on which this B.T.P. is based on to go further into this field and understand the mechanism and intricacies involved in the adsorption on activated carbon surface so that a much more efficient use of this technology can be used based on the specific requirements of the waste generation plant.