Anaerobic Method for Sugar Cane Waste Solution

By: Adilla Lina Putri Amutya

19.01.037
Chemical Engineering 2019
In many developing countries, especially in Asia, sugar cane industry is one of the most important
agricultural industries. As a consequence, sugar cane factory has significant wastewater production.
Most of sugar cane industries in developing countries discharge their wastewater without adequate
treatment. Similar with other wastewater generated by food processing plants, wastewater from sugar
cane industry generally contains organic materials such as carbohydrates and proteins.
Current mainstream technologies for wastewater treatment, such as aerobic activated sludge and tertiary
nutrient removal processes seem to be based on rather high capital costs, which consume more energy,
more skilled labour requirement, produce more sludge, and do not allow recovery of valuable energy
and nutrients. In some extends, those technologies are not economically and technologically affordable,
especially for developing countries where the availability of high skilled personal and permanent energy
supply are not guaranteed.
According Polprasert, the anaerobic process had been ignored for a long time as an option for
wastewater treatment since it was considered to be inefficient and too slow to serve the needs of quickly
expanding wastewater volumes especially in industrialized and dens populated area.
Much of the wastewater in the sugar industry is generated through the cleaning process of the operating
units used. Washing of mill units, evaporation units, clarifiers, centrifuges, etc. produces a large amount
of wastewater. Washing for rotary vacuum filter units and cleaning lime water and SO2 gas producing
units also contribute to the generation of wastewater. This wastewater has high BOD, COD, and TSS
values. The literature also states that wastewater from the sugar industry is also high in carbohydrate
and protein content.
In addition, other contents in this wastewater are solid oil, alkaline and acidic compounds. These organic
materials if discharged into the water can cause the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water to be
reduced. With the high nutrient from the sugar industry wastewater, the growth of water hyacinth can
explode rapidly. The large number of water hyacinths can cause disturbed ecosystems and the death of
various other aquatic biota. The reason is that sunlight is blocked into the water due to obstruction of
the water hyacinth leaves so that the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water reduces drastically. To
solve the environmental problems above, a waste water treatment unit from the sugar industry is needed,
one of which is the anaerobic method.
According to the scientific journal of Mehrdad Farhadian, Mehdi Borghei, and Valentina V. Umrania
at the reactor up-flow anaerobic fixed bed (UAFB) at temperature 32-34 C with HRT for 20 hours and
COD influent amounting to 2000-8000 mg / L the maximum efficiency that can be the resulting amount
is 75% -93%. To resulting in over COD removal efficiency 90% need appropriate packing, in the UAFB
reactor. It can also tolerate very organic bait height up to 10 kg COD / m3 without causing problems
with surgery. The following is a schematic of the reactor UAFB :
 BIOGAS

CAIRAN

EFFLUENT

PUMP

TANGKI

Samaraweera studied anaerobic processing for wastewater from the sugar industry and reports that
chlorination, addition of macronutrients, and temperature binding enhances the process removal of
filaments and lipopolysaccharides from the tank anaerobic, a reduction in the concentration of excess
solids originating from the anaerobic clarifier, increasing concentration of underflow solids from the
anaerobic clarifier, increased alkalinity in anaerobic tanks, increase in percent methane in biogas, and
increase in COD load.
From the that studies, the most effective research to be applied in the treatment of wastewater is anaerob
treatment because it will produce long chain fatty acids at that stage hydrolysis, which hinders the
formation process methane. Also, anaerobic processes partially break down nutrient. What's more, none
of them are able to remove all organic substances contained in wastewater.
Anaerobic management has higher efficiency compared to the method other. In addition, this method
also costs money which is relatively smaller compared to the method other. The disadvantage of this
method, however, is that it is not able to treat the wastewater content in the form of fats and oils and the
resulting effluent further processing is necessary.
However, aerobic treatment is also promising especially using SBR because it can result in high
efficiency of removing nutrients and organic matter. To get higher efficiency, it can using a hybrid
method, by combining membrane use, method of processing biological (aerobic and anaerobic), and
processing physico-chemical. With the hybrid method, limitations each method can be minimized.