Work

Differential overload simulation of condensate and housekeeping rendering wastewater for nutrient removal

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The meat rendering process transforms waste from the meat industry to valuable materials as animal feed supplements. During the rendering process, large amounts of condensate and housekeeping wastewater (CWW and HKWW), solids and greenhouse gases are released into the environment imposing a huge pollution threat. Rendering condensate wastewater also causes many issues that commonly affect biological treatment processes such as pH inhibition, nutrient deficit and temperature. Therefore, the main objective of this work was to simulate the nutrient removal from a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) through the differential nitrogen overload of CWW. With aid of simulation, results found that the current SBR system does not remove carbon and nitrogen as much as other biological systems. This is due to low biodegradation of chemical oxygen demand (COD), the high content of inert particulate carbon (XI), identified in the fractionation of HKWW, and the toxic and inhibitory effect of ammonium present in CWW. When the system is overloaded with nitrogen from CWW there is little removal of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), ordinary heterotrophic organisms (OHO) outnumber autotrophic nitrifying organisms (ANO) and ammonium toxicity occurs, all contributing to a failure to remove nutrients.

Source: Water Science & Technology

DOI: 10.2166/wst.2025.037

Authors: Elias Daniel David Nova-Burgos, Diana Catalina Rodríguez-Loaiza, Julio Cesar Saldarriaga-Molina

Institution: Universidad de Antioquia

Language: English

Topic: Wastewater Treatment and Nitrogen Removal

Subfield: Pollution

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Clean water and sanitation, Responsible consumption and production

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: Universidad de Antioquia