Treatment of Grey Water Using Zeolite

Abstract

Treatment of Grey Water Using Zeolite

A system of a series of five columns was designed to treat and purify effluent grey water generated from washing rock samples from Oil Shale Company. Each column was loaded with a bed of either white sand or faujasite-phillipsite tuff (Zeolite) or charcoal. The faujasite-phillipsite tuff from Jabal Hannoun of Northeast Jordanian Badia was selected because it has suitable mineralogical and technical properties that enable it to be used as an ion-exchanger and adsorbent. These include suitable grain size, total cation exchange capacity, and total zeolite grade.

The used grey water has very high turbidity (3714 NTU) and electrical conductivity (EC) (1200 µs/ cm) and is contaminated with Cu+ and Fe+ compared with tap water, where the turbidity is 2.29 NTU and the EC is 796 µs/ cm.

The grey water was treated by percolation through specially designed treatment columns as a whole system. The zeolite bed loaded in the column has an acceptable efficiency to remove Ca+, Na+, and an excellent efficiency to remove Fe+, Cu+, and Cd+ from the grey water. This filtration system can be applied at any grey water contaminated with cations, organic matter, salts, and of high turbidity. A beds of zeolite, white sand and charcoal loaded in separated columns are capable of cleaning the effluent from the lab at a cost of $350/ ton of zeolite and $430/ ton of white sand and $570/ ton of charcoal, according to local markets prices of 2018.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90350 © 2019 AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition, San Antonio, Texas, May 19-22, 2019