Sustainable wastewater treatments in textile sector

Abstract This chapter focuses on the terminology and traditional treatment of textile wastewater concepts. Textile wastewater (TWW) is one of the most important hazardous wastewaters for ecosystems when it is discharged directly into water streams without proper treatment. The textile industry usually consumes a large amount of water and generates an enormous amount of wastewater which contains many types of pathogens, oxygen-demanding substances and inorganic and synthetic organic chemicals. Effluent guidelines and laws for wastewater treatment plants have been enacted by several protection agencies across the world, based on performance and control technologies. Toxic effluent discharged from various textile industries undergoes several physiochemical processes. Treatment for TWW can be mainly classified into three steps: primary, secondary and tertiary. Conventional treatment methods such as adsorption, coagulation, membrane separation, flotation, ozonation, ion exchange, evaporation and crystallization have been commonly employed for the treatment of TWW. Advanced wastewater treatment can effectively recover water from textile effluents and possibly reuse it in the production process. AWT technologies encourage the design of processes that diminish the spreading and generation of hazardous substances in an aqueous environment. Implementation of suitable AWT processes in textile industries is discussed in a separate section.