Environmental assessment of the quality of industrial effluents

Abstract

At each production facility engaged in the processing or recycling of materials, it is necessary to provide for multi-stage wastewater treatment. This requirement is due to the fact that untreated wastewater discharged into water bodies causes significant harm to ecosystems. In the process of discharging such water, there is a sharp increase in oxygen consumption, which is necessary for the biochemical oxidation of organic compounds contained in wastewater. Many of these organic substances are in a bound state, which makes their decomposition a complex and labor-intensive process. In this work, based on wastewater monitoring, an environmental assessment of the quality of industrial wastewater has been carried out, which will help specialists in making decisions on the planned activity or choosing methods for treating enterprise wastewater. As a result of the work, heterogeneity of discharged wastewater during the day has been revealed. In the resulting wastewater, when they are transported through drainage networks to filtration fields, anaerobic processes, oxidative-destructive microbiological and chemical processes occur, resulting in a significant excess of the main pollutants. At the enterprises under study, the ratio of biochemical oxygen consumption for 5 days to chemical oxygen consumption is within 0.40–0.56, which indicates that the water contains easily oxidizable substances that are subject to biochemical oxidation. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the wastewater treatment system at enterprises of the milk processing industry. In this case, biological methods can be used, according to the reference book on the best available technologies, which include the metered introduction of microbiological preparations and additional aeration, which will allow the use of filtration fields as local treatment facilities without large capital investments.