Study on the compatibility of a treated effluent from automobile industry with conventional municipal activated sludge process

The on-site-treated effluent from an automobile manufacturing company is discharged into the public sewage system for further treatment. However, the upgrade of the treatment plant to reduce the effluent pollutant load led to the discharge limit for phenols being occasionally exceeded. The concern of the water authority prompted a study to investigate whether the toxicity of phenols could affect the performance of the receiving municipal wastewater treatment plant. To this end, mixtures of the industrial effluent and synthetic municipal wastewater were tested in a laboratory-scale activated sludge system. The bioreactor was fed with increasing ratios of the industrial wastewater in the combined influent (from 10 to 50%) over 7 months. No significant differences were observed in the system performance fed only with the synthetic wastewater (during the acclimation stage) or with the industrial wastewater. The bioreactor achieved average removal efficiencies of 70% for phenols even when half of the combined influent was the industrial wastewater. Bearing in mind the question of phenols, an important drawback was the high uncertainty in their determination by the conventional phenol index method due to the matrix effect. To overcome this a spectrophotometric procedure based on the serial dilutions of each pair of influent and effluent samples has been developed. Although strong microbial selection was observed by the changing bioreactor environment, the industrial effluent was found to be fully compatible with further treatment by conventional activated sludge process.