Studies on the treatment of an industrial pharmaceutical wastewater in a Submerged membrane bioreactor

Abstract

Environmental awareness among the people of several well developed and developing countries have forced the various governments to continuously evolve and implement stringent effluent standards for disposal. Hence, newer technologies like the application of membrane separation (micro or ultra filtration) technique coupled with biological processes (known as membrane bioreactor – MBR) were developed, having several distinct advantages over the conventional treatment process/(es). The last decade witnessed a tremendous growth in the use of MBR. However, critical review of literature has revealed that the MBR technology is very scarcely used for the treatment of recalcitrant nature of effluent (ie., pharmaceutical wastewater). Hence, in this study an industrial pharmaceutical wastewater was considered for treatment using a (submerged) membrane bioreactor.