A study of basic and reactive dyes removal from synthetic and industrial

wastewater by electrocoagulation process

Almaz Negash a,*, Dessie Tibebe b,*, Marye Mulugeta b, Yezbie Kassa c,*
a
Department of Chemistry, Debre Tabor University,Ethiopia
b
Department of Chemistry, College of Natural and Computational Sciences, University of Gondar, P.O. Box 196, Gondar, Ethiopia
c
Department of Biology, College of Natural and Computational Sciences, University of Gondar, P. O. box 196, Gondar, Ethiopia

A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Keywords:
Large-scale textile industries used large amounts of toxic chemicals which are very hazardous to human health
Electrocoagulation
Aluminum electrodes
and environmental sustainability. In this study, the removal of various dyes from effluents of textile industries
Basic Blue 3 using the electrocoagulation process was investigated. The studied dyes were Reactive Red 120 (RR-120), Basic
Basic Red 46 Blue 3 (BB-3), and Basic Red 46 (BR-46), which were found in samples collected from effluents of three major
Reactive Red 120 textile factories in the Amhara region, Ethiopia. For maximum removal, the dye BB-3 required acidic pH 3, RR-
Textile industry 120 basic pH 11, while BR-46 neutral pH 7 conditions. BB-3 required a longer treatment time of 80 min than BR-
Wastewater 46 and RR-120, which required 30 and 40 min, respectively. The best removal efficiency of 99.5%, 93.5%, and
96.3% was achieved for BR-46, BB-3, and RR-120, respectively, from synthetic wastewater containing 10 mg L-
1of each dye at an applied potential of 10 V. The method was applied to real textile wastewaters and 73.0 to
99.5% removal of the dyes was achieved, Indicating Electrocoagulation can be used as a simple, and reliable
method for the treatment of real wastewater from textile industries. It is used as a potentially viable and inex-
pensive tool for the treatment of textile dyes Analysis of the electrochemically generated sludge by X-ray
Diffraction, Scanning Electron Microscope, and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy revealed the expected
crystalline aluminum oxides (bayerite (Al(OH)3 diaspore (AlO(OH)) found in the sludge. The amorphous phase
was also found in the floc. Textile industry owners should be aware of the impact of the discharge of effluents on
the Ecosystem and should use the investigated electrocoagulation method for effluent treatment before dis-
charging into the environment.

1. Introduction
Textile industries are among the water-intensive industries that also
impose a large number of wastewaters containing hazardous
substances on the environment (Linares-Herna´ndez et al., 2009; Zodi
et al., 2009; Szygula et al., 2008). The dyeing process in these
industries produces wastewater that is heavily loaded with dyes
(Roussy et al., 2005). Among the dyes used, reactive dyes, such as azo
and basic dyes, are the most toxic for life, by being carcinogenic and
genotoxic (Olsen, 1987). These dyes also persist in the environment
for long periods due to their high thermal and optical stability (Dias et
al., 2003). They are highly toxic to the ecosystem and mutagens,
meaning they can have acute to chronic effects upon organisms,
depending on the exposure time and dye concentration. For example,
dye effluent has been connected to growth reduction, metabolic
stress and death in fish, and growth and
productivity in plants. Contamination, therefore, limits downstream
human water use such as recreation, drinking, fishing, and irrigation.
Therefore, wastewater containing residual dyes needs to be treated
before discharging to the receiving environment to keep the environ-
ment eco-friendly and sustainable (Chequer, 2013).
The textile industry is the largest manufacturing industry in
Ethiopia. Currently, there are fsixty five major state-owned and private
textile and garment factories in the country (Marandi and Sepehr,
2011). Most of these factories, however, have no adequate wastewater
treatment fa- cilities. Instead, they directly discharge the untreated or
inadequately treated wastewater into the nearby canals, rivers, lakes,
and streams, where it poses a serious negative impact on the aquatic
ecological sys- tem (Zinabu and Zerihun, 2002). Several techniques
have been used for the treatment of textile effluents, including
physiochemical methods of dye removal [such as filtration, chemical
coagulation, activated carbon

* Corresponding authors.
E-mail addresses: dessie.tibebe@uog.edu.et (D. Tibebe), yezbie.kassa@uog.edu.et (Y. Kassa).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sajce.2023.07.015
Received 8 May 2023; Received in revised form 26 July 2023; Accepted 31 July 2023
Available online 2 August 2023
1026-9185/© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Institution of Chemical Engineers. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
A. Negash et al.
adsorption, ultrafiltration, and ozonation)], electrocoagulation (EC),
chemical methods of dye removal (such as reduction, oxidation, ion
exchange, and neutralization), and dye removal using biodegradation
(An et al., 1996). Some of these methods are effective, although they
are quite expensive and have many disadvantages and limitations. In
chemical oxidation or coagulation, added chemical substances lead to
secondary pollution. Biological methods cannot be applied to most
textile wastewater types, because most commercial dyes are toxic to
the organisms used in the process (Low and Lee, 1997).
Electrocoagulation technology is one of the common wastewater
treatment techniques without the addition of chemicals that create
secondary pollution (Lin and Peng, 1996). The technology is easy to
operate and environmental friendly which reduces the amount of
disposed of sludge. The equipment is also simple and easily available.
Destabilizing small colloidal particles and eliminating some coagulants
which are hazardous chemicals are mentioned as the other advantages
of this process (Barrera et al., 2003). In this process direct current (DC) is
passed through two sacrificial electrodes immersed into the treating
solution, leading to the dissolution of the sacrificial anode (electrical
oxidation) formed soluble and insoluble species (hydroxide metal)
which act as a coagulant to adsorb and remove soluble or colloidal
pollutants by sedimentation or flotation. In the electrocoagulation pro-
cess, the coagulant ions have generated in situ and continuously
formed. Electrocoagulation is an effective technique, due to the
adsorption of hydroxide on the mineral surface formed in situ being
100 times greater than on pre-precipitated hydroxides when metal
hydroxides have been used as coagulant (V. Khandegar and Saroha,
2013). There are many factors affecting the efficiency of the
electrocoagulation process such as pH, current density, electrode
materials, electrolytic time, and distance between electrodes.
Electrocoagulation technology is a promising technique for potential
pollutant removal from industrial effluents which has various advan-
tages such as Simple equipment, ease of operation, low cost,
selectivity, less reaction time, etc. However, the technique has also
some disad-
vantages due to the ‘sacrificial electrodes’ being dissolved into waste-
water and need to be regularly replaced and the use of electricity (Liu
et al., 2010). Electrocoagulation is a simple and effective process for
treatments, both drinking water and wastewater from different indus-
trial effluents. The electrocoagulation process is more effective than
chemical coagulation due to the anodized aluminum (resulting from
the electrical dissolution of the anode) being more effective than the
aluminum ion introduced in the form of aluminum sulfate solution
(Liu et al., 2010). Electrochemical processes, especially,
electrocoagulation (EC) has been widely used for the treatment of
textile wastewater. Literature reports several studies on the use of EC
and electrochemical techniques for dyeing wastewater treatment
(Castan˜eda-Díaz et al., 2017; Nandi and Patel, 2017; Pirkarami and
Olya, 2017; Orts et al., 2019).
The present work was carried out to study the removal of dyes
(Reactive Red-120 (RR-120), Basic Blue 3 (BB-3), and Basic Red 46 (BR-
46) dyes) from Debre Brihan, Kombolcha, and Bahir Dar textile
effluent by electrocoagulation (EC) with aluminum electrodes. Most of
the studies conducted on effluents from textile industries in Ethiopia
clearly showed the presence of physicochemical change and the status
of bio- logical communities along lakeshores and rivers (Solomon,
2006). The significance of the study is very important to reduce the
pollution problem with textile industries in Ethiopia. Therefore, in this
study, treatment performance evaluation of textile industrial effluents
in the Amhara region, Ethiopia, was investigated by electrocoagulation
tech- nique. Generally, the particular impacts of point source studies
like in- dustrial effluents in the country in particular to ANRS are not
assessed. Thus it is of paramount importance to evaluate the impact of
industrial effluents and their treatment technology to solve community
problems living around the industries. Therefore, the main objective of
this project work is to investigate the treatment and characterization of
textile in- dustrial effluents in the Amhara regional state by
electrocoagulation
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South African Journal of Chemical Engineering 46 (2023) 122–131
method.
Funding
No funding was obtained for this study.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are
available from the corresponding author.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Almaz Negash: Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation,
Methodology, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft. Dessie
Tibebe: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project
administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Visualization,
Writing – review & editing. Marye Mulugeta: Data curation, Formal
analysis, Software, Validation, Writing – review & editing. Yezbie
Kassa: Data curation, Resources, Supervision, Writing – review &
editing.
Declration of Comppeting Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
All the researchers gratefully acknowledge the support of
University of Gondar.
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