Combined electrochemical, sunlight-induced oxidation and biological process for the treatment of chloride containing textile effluent

This study presents a combined electrochemical, sunlight-induced oxidation and biological process for the treatment of textile effluent. In the first step, RuO₂-TiO₂/Ti and Titanium were used as the electrodes in EO process and color removal was achieved in 40 min at an applied current density of 20 mA cm⁻². The EO process generated about 250 mg L⁻¹ of active chlorine which hampered the subsequent biological treatment process. Thus, in the second step, sun light-induced photolysis (SLIP) is explored to remove hypochlorite present in the EO treated effluent. In the third step, the SLIP treated effluent was fed to laccase positive bacterial consortium for biological process. To assess the effect of SLIP in the overall process, experiments were carried out with and without SLIP process. In experiments without SLIP, sodium thiosulfate was used to remove active chlorine. HPLC analysis showed that SLIP integrated experiments achieved an overall dye component degradation of 71%, where as only 22% degradation was achieved in the absence of SLIP process. The improvement in degradation with SLIP process is attributed to the presence of ClO[rad] radicals which detected by EPR analysis. The oxidation of organic molecules during process was confirmed by FT-IR and GC-MS analysis.