Potential Recovery of a Textile Wastewater Treatment Plant Sludge Into Clay Bricks

As the country started to become an export oriented country since the early 1970s, the growth of Malaysia’s textile industry has increased greatly. In 2011 alone, the country has provided a total of RM10.8 billion of exports of textile products and RM 6.6 billion of imports. This valuable improvement has lead to several environmental impacts involving land and water pollution. The current trend in waste management is to examine the feasibility of using textile sludge generated in wastewater treatment plants of textile industry as a partial replacement for clay as building materials. The chemical and physical properties of clay and textile have been analyzed. The effects of sludge proportion (0%-10%), and firing temperature (950oC and 1180oC) on the quality of the clay bricks were examined. The tests were conducted as per British Standard (BS) codes to investigate the potential of the textile sludge to be incorporate into clay for use as engineering blocks and load bearing bricks. According to the results, sludge addition and firing temperature are the important factors to determine the quality of clay bricks. All clay samples satisfied the requirement of British Standard norms in term of compressive strength and water absorption. It is seen that all bulk density of clay samples did not comply with good quality of clay brick but they can be categorized as lightweight building materials. Textile sludge was also tested for substitution into cement bricks. Cement samples with 10% textile sludge substitution comply with the requirement of British Standard norm for load bearing class 3. In summary, this study provides a preliminary research output that will contribute to expand a new area of research in recycling of textile sludge.