Combined adsorption and biological treatment for landfill leachate management

Abstract

Although landfilling is generally used for solid waste disposal, use of landfill will always accompanied with production of turbid, odorous and dark brownish liquid which known as leachate. Due to leachate adverse impacts towards public health, environment and ecosystem, raw leachate wastewater should be treated properly before discharging into the environment and leachate wastewater can be treated biologically, physically and chemically. The treatment efficiency will be mainly affected by leachate composition and treatment method. In this study, B. panacihumi strain ZB1 was used for leachate biological treatment and light weight aggregates was used as adsorbent for pollutants removal. The leachate samples were treated by combined adsorption and biological treatment. Sole biological treatment removes nearly 40% of COD and nearly 40-50% of ammonia nitrogen from leachate samples. Adsorbent able to remove high levels of ammonia nitrogen and increase of adsorbent doses would increase the removal efficiency. Due to cost and efficiency consideration, combined adsorption and biological treatment had been applied for leachate management. Combined treatment allowed more than 70% of ammonia nitrogen from leachate wastewater. Since removal of COD from leachate wastewater does not being reported in this study, other treatment methods or optimization step should be carried out.