TREATMENT OF DISTILLERY EFFLUENT BY Pseudomonas cruciviae

Abstract

Distillary waste water generally known as stillage, constitutes a high strength acidic waste that presents significant disposal or treatment problems. Intensive treatment of distillery waste water has become imperative due to its high BOD, COD, suspended solids and highly objectionable colour. The BOD of the waste water ranges from 45,000 to 60,000 mg/I and as per the Pollution Control Board Stanards, the BOD for disposal into river and on land should not exceed 30 mg/1 and 100 mg/ 1 respectively. The various studies undertaken for the treatment of distillery effluent have not been able to yield an efficient and economical treatment method to achieve the desired standards. The methods adopted presently include physico-chemical treat-ment and biological treatment, latter being more successful. In biological treatment also combination of anaerobic and aerobic processes have been in vogue but the effluent of combined process needs to be further treated for safe discharge into rivers or streams and on land. The present study is an attempt to treat the partially treated distillery effluent by using both free and immobilized cells of Pseudonionas cruciviae. The optimiza-tion of various culture parameters indicate that the optimal conditions are, using sample without dilution at a neutral pH, supplemented by 0.8% of glucose concen-tration and taking 80 beads per 100 ml sample for immobilized cell treatment. The batch studies conducted with free cells under optimum conditions indicate COD and colour removal efficiencies of 55.4% and 68.1% respectively with a detention time of 48 hours. Whereas with immobilized cells the removal efficiences of 56.5% for COD and 57.4% for colour have been achieved in a detention time of just 24 hours.