Resource recovery from landfill leachate: An experimental investigation and perspectives

Tonni Agustiono Kurniawan; Deepak Singh; Ram Avtar; Mohd Hafiz Dzarfan Othman; Goh Hui Hwang; Ahmad B Albadarin; Mashallah Rezakazemi; Tjandra Setiadi; Saeed Shirazian

doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.129986

Resource recovery from landfill leachate: An experimental investigation and perspectives

Chemosphere. 2021 Jul:274:129986. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.129986. Epub 2021 Feb 16.

Authors

Tonni Agustiono Kurniawan¹, Deepak Singh², Ram Avtar³, Mohd Hafiz Dzarfan Othman⁴, Goh Hui Hwang⁵, Ahmad B Albadarin⁶, Mashallah Rezakazemi⁷, Tjandra Setiadi⁸, Saeed Shirazian⁹

Affiliations

¹ College of the Environment and Ecology, Xiamen University, Fujian, 361102, China. Electronic address: tonni@xmu.edu.cn.
² Department of Geography and Resource Management, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
³ Faculty of Environmental Earth Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, 060-0810, Japan.
⁴ Advanced Membrane Technology Research Centre (AMTEC), School of Chemical and Energy Engineering, University Teknologi Malaysia, 81310, Skudai, Johor, Malaysia.
⁵ School of Electrical Engineering, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi, PR China.
⁶ Department of Chemical Sciences, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.
⁷ Faculty of Chemical and Materials Engineering, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, Iran.
⁸ Center for Environmental Studies, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, 40135, Indonesia.
⁹ Institute of Research and Development, Duy Tan University, Da Nang, 550000, Viet Nam; Faculty of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Duy Tan University, Da Nang, 550000, Viet Nam; Laboratory of Computational Modeling of Drugs, South Ural State University, 454080, Chelyabinsk, Russia.

PMID: 33979934
DOI: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.129986

Abstract

This work investigates the performances of coconut shell waste-based activated carbon (CSWAC) adsorption in batch studies for removal of ammoniacal nitrogen (NH₃-N) and refractory pollutants (as indicated by decreasing COD concentration) from landfill leachate. To valorize unused resources, coconut shell, recovered and recycled from agricultural waste, was converted into activated carbon, which can be used for leachate treatment. The ozonation of the CSWAC was conducted to enhance its removal performance for target pollutants. The adsorption mechanisms of refractory pollutants by the adsorbent are proposed. Perspectives on nutrient recovery technologies from landfill leachate from the view-points of downstream processing are presented. Their removal efficiencies for both recalcitrant compounds and ammoniacal nitrogen were compared to those of other techniques reported in previous work. It is found that the ozonated CSWAC substantially removed COD (i.e. 76%) as well as NH₃-N (i.e. 75%), as compared to the CSWAC without pretreatment (i.e. COD: 44%; NH₃-N: 51%) with NH₃-N and COD concentrations of 2750 and 8500 mg/L, respectively. This reveals the need of ozonation for the adsorbent to improve its performance for the removal of COD and NH₃-N at optimized reactions: 30 g/L of CSWAC, pH 8, 200 rpm of shaking speed and 20 min of reaction time. Nevertheless, treatment of the leachate samples using the ozonated CSWAC alone was still unable to result in treated effluents that could meet the COD and NH₃-N discharge standards below 200 and 5 mg/L, respectively, set by legislative requirements. This reveals that another treatment is necessary to be undertaken to comply with the requirement of their effluent limit.

Keywords: Ammonium nitrogen; Nutrient recovery; Ozonation; Phosphorus; Waste valorization.

MeSH terms

Adsorption
Charcoal
Nitrogen
Water Pollutants, Chemical* / analysis

Substances

Water Pollutants, Chemical
Charcoal
Nitrogen