The Applicability of an Advanced Oxidation Process for Textile Finishing Waste Streams & Fate of Persistent Organic Pollutants

The trend of sustainable use of available water resources encourages textile finishing enterprises to implement efficient wastewater treatment technologies that enable water recycling, and not just it’s discharging into the local wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). This paper presents the results obtained from the H 2O2/UV treatment of wastewater from Slovene textile finishing company. Laboratory scale decolouration experiments were performed on the most representative wastewater samples, collected in three months period. In general 80 % decolouration and 86 % total organic carbon (TOC) reduction was achieved. On the other hand, the use of ultraviolet (UV) radiation to degrade and destroy organic pollutants in textile wastewater could lead to the formation of toxic dioxins and dioxin-like compounds, groups of persistent organic pollutants, especially due to the presence of halogenated compounds in textile finishing processes. For these reasons, textile wastewater samples were analysed for any content of dioxins before and after the treatment with H 2O2/UV.