Treatment of Batik Industry Wastewater Plant Effluent using Nanofiltration

In this study, the removal of dyes, sulfide, and some other components in batik wastewater using a nanofiltration (NF) membrane was investigated. Remazol red (RR dye), indigosol brown (IB dye), and sodium sulfide (Na₂S) were used as models of synthetic batik wastewater. Furthermore, NF performance for treating real batik wastewater was also examined. The effects of operating conditions on flux and rejection were investigated. The results showed that all filtration had similar permeate flux behavior, where rapid flux decline was observed at the initial filtration, followed by gradual flux decrease and then reaching a stable flux. The rejections of the pollutant model during NF of synthetic wastewater were 61–76%, 90–95%, and 90–99% for sulfide, IB, and RR, respectively. The color rejection in real batik wastewater was 99.84%. Further, the removal of chemical oxygen demand (COD) reached 87.6%. 

Batik wastewater; Dye removal; Fouling; Nanofiltration; Sulfide removal

Batik is the largest home-based textile industry in Indonesia. Batik is a decorated textile product that combines both art and craft (Anjani et al., 2013; Soesanti and Syahputra, 2016). In principle, selected areas of the cloth are blocked out using hot wax, and the remaining is then dyed or decorated. Thereafter, the dyed cloth is washed to remove the wax using water. The areas covered with wax resist the dye and remain in the original color. Increased batik demand affects the growth and development of batik industry centers in various regions in Indonesia. It consumes much water for the dyeing, fixing, and washing processes. Consequently, many wastewaters containing dye, wax, and other chemicals are produced.

        It is commonly known that the esthetic nature of water and aquatic photosynthesis is disturbed by the presence of dyes and alkaline conditions. Furthermore, the presence of color hinders aquatic plant and fish growth. More importantly, most dyes used in the batik industry have complex structures, making them difficult to degrade chemically, biologically, and photo-degradation (Akbari et al., 2002; Punzi et al., 2015; Lu et al., 2019). Therefore, this batik wastewater requires treatment before being discharged into the environment or being reused. Unfortunately, many home-based batik industries in Indonesia discharge their wastewater without proper treatment.

The chemicals used frequently in batik industries include pigments, dyes, and wax. The commonly used textile dyes are derived from azo compounds and benzene derivatives, which require a long time to degrade (Handajani and Narissi, 2016). Saratale et al. (2011) reported that 60–70% of textiles dye contains azo dyes with ?N=N? bond. It has been documented that only a small number of dyestuffs are biodegradable, and the residual color from azo dyes is usually low biodegradable due to their insolubility (Al-Kdasi et al., 2004). In addition, azo dyes can be a source of disease due to their carcinogenic and mutagenic properties (Camargo-Ventura et al., 2011). Thus, the removal of dyes and sulfide in batik wastewater is imperative.

Several methods have been proposed to treat textile wastewater, including ozonation (Peralto et al., 1999), photochemical (Peralto et al., 1999), adsorption (Choy et al., 1999), ion exchange (Slokar and Le Marechal, 1997), floatation (Warjito and Nurrohman, 2016), and electrokinetic coagulation (Sharfan et al., 2018). In general, such methods resulted in dye removal efficiencies within the range of 70–95%. Unfortunately, these processes require large areas or generate a huge volume of hazardous sludge, causing a problem of waste disposal. Therefore, in this study, nanofiltration (NF) is proposed to handle these problems due to its versatile application in wastewater treatment, high efficiency, and environmentally friendly process (Wang et al., 2019).

Rashidi et al. (2013, 2014) explored batik wastewater treatment, especially in Malaysia, using physical pretreatment and NF membranes. The chemical oxygen demand (COD) value in the permeate samples was reduced to zero, and the dye removal ef?ciency exceeded 90%. Nevertheless, they used only synthetic wastewater containing various dyes and waxes. Further, they focused on the removal of dye, wax, and COD, while other substances, such as sulfide and the effect of dissolved salt on process performance, were not discussed. Notably, salt is usually added during dyeing processing in batik production, especially in Indonesia, to produce a brighter Batik color and also to increase the fixation degree of dye on cloth material. More importantly, the dye used by the Batik industry in Indonesia and Malaysia probably differs due to the difference in consumer taste and chemicals used.

        The effects of TMP, feed concentration, and salt concentration on permeate flux behavior were observed. All filtrations showed similar permeate flux behavior, where rapid flux decline was observed at the initial filtration, followed by a gradual slight flux decrease with increasing filtration time, reaching a stable flux. No significant effect of TMP on solute rejection was observed for all pollutant models. In contrast, the solute rejection kept decreasing with increasing feed concentration alongside NaCl concentration. Concentration polarization contributed significantly to the flux decline, but fouling via gel or cake layer formation still dominated the cause of flux decline. Thus, a periodic external cleaning was important to be conducted from a practical viewpoint.

    The authors thank the Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia (grant number 101–165/UN7.P4.3/PP/2019) for funding this research. The authors would also like to thank USAID through the Sustainable Higher Education Research Alliance (SHERA) Program for the Universitas Indonesia SMART CITY project for the opportunity to increase the quality of this research.

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