Palm oil mill effluent (POME) treatment has developed in the last decade. Due to the characteristic and volume of POME,
it needed a complete treatment to reduce the pollutant content. Three pre-treatments method, ultrafiltration, adsorption
and decantation were applied prior to nanofiltration (NF) membrane. The polyethersulphone membrane, montmorillonite
as the adsorbent and modern decanter was investigated in this research. Two types of NF membrane, named NF-1 and
NF-ASP30 were used after pre-treatment. The removal of four important parameters were determined i.e. COD, TSS, colour
and turbidity. The results showed that the adsorption and UF is better than decantation pre-treatment. The ultrafiltration
and adsorption can reduce POME content more than 80% for all parameter while decantation varied between 40 and 80%.
The combination of ultrafiltration and adsorption with both of NF membrane can removed almost all the parameter. But
the decantation can only remove the turbidity but not for the rest of the parameters. Besides the POME content, the flux
decline for both of NF membrane was also investigated. The flux of NF-1 membrane was higher than NF-ASP30 membrane
but NF-ASP was more relative stable for the flux decline. Overall, NF-1 has better performance in flux decline.
Malaysian economy relies on palm oil industries as a driver for rural development. However, palm oil mill effluent
(POME) that is generated from palm oil processing stages causes major environmental challenges. Before being
released to the environment, POME treatment is crucial to comply with standard discharge limit. Microalgae have
demonstrated excellent potential for phycoremediating POME and capturing CO2
. In this study, local microalgae isolate
such as Chlamydomonas sp. UKM 6 and Chlorella spp. UKM 8 were used for POME treatment in 21 days with different
inoculum sizes (5%, 10% and 15%). In addition, an integrated treatment process was performed by taking the treated
POME supernatant for cultivation of Chorella spp. UKM 2, Chorella sorokiniana UKM 3 and Chlorella vulgaris for CO2
sequestration study. Different CO2
concentrations (5%, 10% and 15%) were used and the experiments were carried
out in 10 days under continuous illumination. The results showed that among two species involves in POME treatment,
Chlamydomonas sp. UKM 6 showed a great potential to remove pollutant such as COD (56%), nitrogen (65%) and
phosphorus (34%). The biomass after POME treatment and CO2
biofixation content high lipid (90 mg lipid/g biomass)
which can be the potential source for biodiesel production. In CO2
sequestration study, C. sorokininana UKM3 able
to takes up to 15% CO2
with CO2
uptake rate of 273 mgL-1d-1. In this study, the integrated system of POME treatment
and CO2
sequestration were feasible using microalgae.
This study was conducted to examine the production of bioflocculants using agricultural wastewater as a fermentation feedstock under different temperatures and incubation times. The mechanism of flocculation was studied to gain a detailed understanding of the flocculation activity. The highest bioflocculant yield (2.03 g/L) at a temperature of 40 °C was produced in a palm oil mill effluent medium (BioF-POME). Bioflocculant produced from a fermented SME medium (BioF-SME) showed the highest activity. The flocculation tests for colour and turbidity removal from lake water indicated that BioF-SME and BioF-POME performed comparably to commercial alum. Analyses of the bioflocculants using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) found that the bioflocculants contained xylose and glucose. The mechanism study showed that flocculation occurred through charge neutralization and interparticle bridging between the bioflocculant polymer and the particles in the lake water. Thus, agricultural wastewater can be used as a fermentation feedstock for high-quality bioflocculants.