Treatment of Herbal Pharmaceutical Wastewater with Energy Recovery

Herbal based pharmaceutical wastewater distinguishes itself because of its high content of organic pollutant and being highly acidic in nature. Adopting aerobic processes as a treatment alternative involves high capital investments, requires skilled manpower in addition to being energy intensive. On the contrary, an anaerobic system provides a low investment technology using aeration equipment, sludge disposal facility and recirculation with a prime advantage of methane recovery. The concept of immobilization technology has been incorporated in this research for biomethanation of high strength herbal based pharmaceutical wastewater. Accordingly, an investigation has been made on bench scale to assess the feasibility of an anaerobic fixed film fixed bed reactor system to treat herbal based pharmaceutical wastewater with recourse to energy recovery and to evaluate the system performance under different operating conditions.