CHITOSAN: AN EFFECTIVE MATERIAL FOR TEXTILE WASTE WATER MANAGEMENT

In recent years dye removal by environmentally friendly, low-cost adsorbents from textile wastewater are in demand. Many researchers have focused on low cost bio-materials like cellulose, alginate, chitosan and lignin. But till today no such materials have found commercial significance in wastewater treatment. Very less work is found which is carried on real life waste water. As being the second largest biodegradable polysaccharide, chitosan has gained preferred interest than others in diversified fields including textile. Chitosan possesses a cationic character in acidic medium enabling its dissolution and possibilities of ion‐exchange interactions with anionic compounds. This offers the probability of acting as a sequestrant and can also undergo chemical modifications yielding a large variety of useful derivatives. In this research work, chitosan was dissolved using acetic acid at different concentrations to observe the effect of chitosan dosage in textile effluent parameters obtained from a local factory. Results revealed that chitosan could successfully be used to coagulate and flocculate anionic suspended solids to lower down the TDS, COD, BOD values and more effectively used as a bio-adsorbent to remove color from the wastewater. The highest chitosan performance was obtained with 60ml of 0.05% and 0.1% chitosan solution which reduced the polluted water characteristics like COD, BOD, and TDS below the maximum discharge value with a significant reduction in color.