Eco-Friendly Degradation of Reactive Blue Dye Enriched Textile Water by Floating Treatment Wetlands (FTWs) System Applying the Strategy of Plant-Bacteria Partnership (Part-B)

Textile dye enriched effluents have been credited to be heavily polluted and highly hazardous to environment. Cleaning of textile wastewater from these dangerous pollutants is a deeply concerned issue of the industry. Various physico-chemical and biological techniques are being practiced to remediate these effluents. But all these strategies have limitations at any corner of their application. Floating treatment wetlands (FTWs) are acknowledged as economical treatment options for various kinds of wastewater. Their efficacy has been ascribed in many lab-scale and pilot-scale studies, however scarceness of published data lies in sense of application of this technique using free floating aquatic plants for treating major primary reactive blue dye enriched textile water. So, the present study attempted to evaluate the performance of this method using two free floating aquatic plants, “Eichhornia crassipes” and “ Pistia stratiotes” to develop a lab scale FTWs system augmented with two pollutant degrading and plant growth promoting bacteria, “Bacillus cereus” and “Bacillus subtilis” after four retention times, 0, 24, 48 and 72 h. One control and eight FTW treatment reactors were established containing plants and bacteria separately or in combination. This system was applied to treat reactive blue dye enriched textile wastewater prepared synthetically. A remarkable reduction in pollutant indicating parameters, BOD, COD and colour concentration was observed for treatment reactor having Eichhornia crassipes and Bacillus cereus combination for 72 h retention time. All this stamped the authenticity of this plant-microbial enhanced FTWs technique to treat textile wastewater and opened an era of its on-site application.