Zindagi Malhotra
ABSTRACT
Domestic wastewater is an ever-growing problem that poses significant environmental challenges. This wastewater in homes and buildings often contains pollutants, heavy metals, and dangerous pathogens. Traditional wastewater treatment plants are capital-intensive and extremely costly facilities. They need to be more sustainable and attainable to use on a small scale. Past research has analyzed the effectiveness of other adsorbents on different kinds of wastewater and has successfully mitigated some unwanted chemicals. In this paper, easily accessible adsorbents such as spent tea leaves, sawdust, and charcoal were tested for their efficiency in treating domestic wastewater. Recycled plastic bottles were used to create a filtering mechanism that allowed wastewater to be poured over the adsorbent, filtering through and then dripping into another glass through a hole in the bottle cap. The effectiveness was tested by measuring the physicochemical parameters of the wastewater pre and post-passing through the adsorption filter. The charcoal removed 95% of turbidity from the wastewater. Charcoal, Sawdust, and the combined filter significantly lowered the pH of the raw wastewater from 9.5 to 7.0-7.5, however Spent tea filter drastically lowered the pH to 5.5. All the filters showed a reduction in the levels of fluoride, nitrate, iron, hardness, and chloride. This study suggests that these adsorbents have the potential to be used to treat wastewater containing organic pollutants sustainably and conveniently, while charcoal proved to be the most effective. Hence, in the future charcoal can be utilized in the treatment of domestic wastewater.
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