The Effectiveness EM Mudball and Banana Peels for Textile Wastewater Treatment

Department of Water and Environmental Engineering, University of Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Johor Bahru

^a Corresponding author: ariffn@uthm.edu.my

Abstract

Textile industrial activities known as a higher consumer of water that involved several processed daily to maintain the quality of fabric that contribute to the water pollution. Wastewater produced from the textiles could lead to the presence of heavy metal contaminant. Meanwhile, heavy metal is one of the contaminants in wastewater and must be overcome with the appropriate treatment process. To overcome the heavy metal issue, the absorption method by organic waste could be used. Effective microorganism (EM) mudballs and banana peels is a method for threating wastewater quality from textiles effluent. EM is a medium that is able to improve water quality without altering the design area while the banana peels act as a nutrient to microorganism growth and have a potential to removed heavy metal contaminant that produced from textiles wastewater. Method that used to carry out this study are through the laboratory experimental for all consider parameters. The result was obtained shows that EM mudball itself are capable to reduce the concentration of BOD and COD as much as 84% for BOD with the value reduced to 37 mg/L and 90% for COD with the value reduced to 89 mg/L. The effectiveness of banana peels added to the EM mudball could be seen by the 70% of banana peels are well mixed with the EM mudball have the potential to reduce the concentration of BOD, COD and heavy metal contaminant in textiles wastewater as much as 81% for BOD (43 mg/L), 90% of COD (87 mg/L), and 86% of Zink (Zn²⁺) with the value is 0.065 mg/L. From the comparison of result with the standard