Sustainable Treatment of Textile Dyeing Wastewater: the Use of Aniline-degrading Bacteria

The objective of this project is to enhance the textile dyeing wastewater treatment through identification, cultivation and immobilisation of specialised microorganisms for aniline compounds degradation and decolourisation. Five typical textile dyeing wastewater treatment plants are selected for evaluation. Details of the evaluation works include:

1. analyse the microbial compositions in the wastewater treatment plants by DNA sequencing.
2. identify specialised aniline-degrading bacteria and decolourising bacteria in dyeing wastewater
3. enhance, enrich and immobilise the specialised microbial consortium in biological treatment
4. apply the technology in industrial use, the pilot system pilot system with specialised microbial consortium and enhanced treatment scheme is set up at Pacific Textiles’ factory in Panyu to review its performance on aniline and colour removal.
5. formulate the enhanced treatment scheme for textile dyeing industry.

Aniline compounds are a group of toxic and mutagenic compounds. Despite of the implementation of new stringent discharge standard in China that restricts aniline compounds concentration down to below detection limit, aniline compounds were still found in the effluent discharge. This project provides an innovative and sustainable wastewater treatment method to removal aniline compounds for the textile industry.