EFFICIENCY OF A NEW FILTRATION PILOT BASED ON CLAYCOMPOSITE MATERIAL

The presence of organic contaminants in the environment, especially in water, have become a major concern due to the toxicity of many of them. This is a growing problem because the organic compounds include pesticides, crude oil and substances called ‘emerging pollutants’, which comprise a large number of pharmaceuticals. Most of pharmaceutical compounds found in the aqueous environments come either from domestic sewage or from hospitals, or industrial discharges. They are generally excreted from humans and animals after being partially or completely converted to metabolites with enhanced solubility in water, even if a significant quantity of the parent drug may also be excreted unchanged. To remediate this pollution problem, various chemical, physical and biological processes have been developed, such as microbial degradation, filtration, adsorption, coagulation and membrane separation. However, all of these remediation methods have suffered from certain limitations and disadvantages such as high cost, poor removal efficiency and possibility of desorption and redistribution. All of these compounds along with their metabolites, which can be sometimes more harmful than the original compounds, enter the municipal treatment plants (MTPs) in which they often cannot be destroyed or removed. Normally, MTPs are affected by a low efficiency of removal, ranging from 60% to 90% for a variety of polar compounds. In this work a new filtration pilot system based on clay-composite material is described. This new tool has been validated to remove many organic contaminants (pesticide and pharmaceutical residues) generally present in real MTPs effluents. It has been also tested successfully to reduce the COD load of an industrial wastewater, whose organic content has been concentrated more than 10 times in the filtration material.