Wong Pui Wah, Nik Meriam Sulaiman, Meenakshisundaram Nachiappan, and Balaraman Varadaraj

pp. 891 - 898

Abstract

Treatment of palm oil mill effluent (POME) has always been a topic of research in Malaysia. This
effluent that is extremely rich in organic content needs to be properly treated to minimize environmental
hazards before it is released into watercourses. The common practice for treating POME in Malaysia involves a combination of aerobic and anaerobic methods. The purpose of tertiary treatment is to allow the
treated water to be reused in the mill operations for other purposes such as feed water. The proposed
treatment will also ensure the industry to meet a more stringent discharge standard in terms of the BOD,
COD and nitrogen values. In this study membrane ultrafiltration is used as the tertiary treatment method.
Before the actual membrane operation was conducted, the samples were pre-treated using three separate
method namely filtration, centrifugation and coagulation. It was found that the combination of filtrationultrafiltration treatment POME produced the best-treated sample quality in terms of pollutant contents
elimination, namely % BOD, % COD and % nitrogen removal.