Removal of heavy metals from textile industry wastewater

Wastewaters of several industries such as textile, leather or dye etc., contain dangerous and toxic compounds, even some of which are potential carcinogenics. Considering the volume and composition, wastewaters of the textile industry have much more polluting characteristics compared to other industries. Although treatment processes must definitely be implemented in point of environment and living organisms, many factories discharge their wastewaters to acceptor media without any treatment because of high costs. This study investigated zeolite and clay with high availability and low cost in wastewater treatment as more economically feasible alternatives to activated carbon. The wastewater treatment adequacy of zeolite-clay mixture was also investigated. We determined the optimum treatment time for heavy metal removal from the dye-containing wastewater samples as 6 hours. The mixture of clay+zeolite+activated carbon provided the highest removal of Cd, Cu, Mn, Pb, and Zn compared to zeolite, clay, activated carbon, activated carbon+clay, activated carbon+zeolite and clay+zeolite.