Introduction

In environmental engineering, specific parameters are very important, one of which is water and its quality. A supply of clean water is essential for establishing and maintaining diverse human activities. Water resources are useful in the provision of valuable food through aquatic life as well as irrigation for agricultural production. However, liquid and solid wastes produced by human settlements and industrial activities pollute most of the water sources throughout the world (Dhote, Ingoleb, and Chavhana, 2012). It is therefore imperative that water quality should be assessed all over the world. Water quality is defined by several parameters which are physical, chemical, and biological. The deterioration of the quality of the surface water, groundwater systems is mainly controlled by the geological structure and the lithology of the watersheds/aquifers, the chemical reactions that take place within the watershed/aquifers as well as the type of land use and the anthropogenic activities (Melidis, Vaiopoulou, and Aivasidis, 2007). Furthermore, the quality of the water resources is vulnerable to a wide range of chemical components which includes organic materials, nutrients, salts, sediments, heavy metals, and other pollutants (Korfali and Jurdi 2011, Qadir 2010). Many of these wastes that emerge from industrialization and civilization enter into water bodies via discharge from domestic, industrial, and non-point sources (Welch and Naczk, 1992).

In the research by Amoatey and Bani (2011), a short history of wastewater treatment was presented. Wastewater treatment is reasonably a new practice, even though there has been a history of the construction of drainage long before the nineteenth century. Before this time, human faeces and urine usually regarded as “night soil” was put in buckets along the streets and workers come around to collect them into honey wagon tanks. The waste was taken to rural areas and disposed of on agricultural lands which served as fertilizers. At the advent of innovations in the nineteenth century, the flush toilet was invented, which caused an increase in the volume of waste generated for these agricultural lands. Cities like Rome due to their large population adopted the use of drainage and storm sewers to transport wastewater into water bodies against Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 recommendation that rain should go to the river while sewage goes to the soil. Irrespective of the massive supplies of fresh water and natural cleansing ability of surface water, in 1850, the population had so increased that there were several outbreaks of life-threatening diseases. These diseases were discovered to be caused by the pathogenic bacteria present in the polluted water. In 1842, the first modern sewerage system for conveying wastewater was built by an English engineer named Lindley in Hamburg, Germany. This invention has been improved over time and is still being adopted in today’s wastewater management practices. The treatment of wastewater was evident only the acceptable limit of the water bodies was surpassed and health challenges became unbearable. Gross pollution and ravaging health hazards were the results of discharging waste into water bodies, especially for downstream users. Between the late 1800s and early 1900s, many alternatives were explored until 1920, when more stable and adequate treatment processes used today were developed. Although its design was empirical, in the midcentury it became established and the centralized wastewater systems were incorporated.

Recently, advancements have been made to derive portable water from wastewater. Irrespective of the size of the collecting water body, it is required that wastewater is treated to a minimum level before discharging (Peavy, Rowe, and Tchobanoglous, 1985). Also, the more sustainable decentralized wastewater treatment (DEWATS) system is adopted over the centralized systems especially in developing countries where there is poor wastewater infrastructure (Adu-Ahyia and Anku, 2010). Filtration is one of the most important treatment processes used in water and wastewater treatment. In water treatment, it is used to purify the surface water for potable use whereas, in wastewater treatment, the main purpose of filtration is to produce effluent of high quality so that it can be reused for various purposes. Any type of filter with attached biomass on the filter media can be defined as a biofilter (Metcalf and Eddy, 2003). It can be the trickling filter in the wastewater treatment plant, or horizontal rock filter in a polluted stream, or granular activated carbon (GAC) or sand filter in the wastewater treatment plant. Biofilters have been successfully used for air, water, and wastewater treatment. It was first introduced in England in 1893 as a trickling filter in wastewater treatment (Metcalf and Eddy, 1991), and since then, it has been successfully used for the treatment of domestic and industrial wastewater. On research, it has been discovered that certain materials such as rice husk (or hull), coconut fiber (coir), sugar cane (also known as bagasse), maize cobs, sawdust, bed of sand, peat, shredded tires, foam, crushed glass, geo-textile fabric, and anthracite can be used for wastewater treatment in treating impurities present in the wastewater.

Problem Statement

According to Benetti, (2008), water, food, and energy supply are the three main problems faced by the world today. Therefore, to solve these problems, domestic wastewater is now treated as a resource instead of a waste. The 1st and 3rd problems can be solved by treating wastewater for domestic consumption, landscaping, and crop irrigation. This process saves water as well as utilizes the fertilizing elements wastewater contains. Domestic wastewater can be used as a source of energy through anaerobic digestion, to solve the 3rd problem. It involves the production of methane gas (CH₄) from wastewater organic content by anaerobic digestion (Myint, Nirmalakhandan, and Speece, 2007).

Day (1996) presented due to the massive increase in the world’s human population, water will become one of the scarcest resources in the 21st century. As human numbers increase, there would be greater strains on the available resources and a greater threat will be posted on the environmental sources. A report by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, 1997) concluded that there is no sustainability in the current use of freshwater by either developing or developed nations and that worldwide, water usage has been growing at more than three times the world’s population increase, consequently leading to widespread public health problems, limiting economic and agricultural development and adversely affecting a wide range of ecosystems. This has motivated more comprehensive research in water treatment and management.

Given the above-cited problems, wastewater must be properly treated and managed to retain equilibrium in the earth. Wastewater treatment in many countries is relatively expensive and people would not readily want to engage in such due to the expenses in putting up a sewage treatment plant or activated sludge system. They would rather opt-out to use the general septic tanks which are below the earth's surface and would continually pollute underground water as the population of people increases. The reasons behind the high price of establishing one of the above-listed wastewater treatment techniques are; the limitation in materials to be used, low numbers of expertise, inaccessibility of the technology, unavailability of infrastructure that supports such systems, and money to access the technology. In this study, the suggestion of certain biofilter materials such as; coconut fiber (coir) that are easily accessible in the environment especially in African and European countries where a lot of fiber food is consumed if properly invested into, will reduce the outrageous prices of wastewater treatment, make it user friendly as well as easily accessible. Thus, by the discoveries made in the preparation process of this study, the whole engineering world can go a step closer in the reduction of costs and expensive filtration medium.

Aim and Objectives

The study aims to maximize the use of a certain material easily accessible in the environment which is coconut fiber (coir) for tertiary wastewater treatment.

Specifically, the research is set out to achieve the following objectives:

• To analyze the physical, biological, chemical, and engineering properties of coconut fiber (coir).
• To analyze the effects of coconut fiber (coir) on wastewater and the possible effluent they will produce.
• To determine how the use of these materials could reduce the cost of wastewater treatment.
• To juxtapose results from coir usage with already used biofilters such as sand filters, granular activated carbon, and crushed rocks or gravel.

Research Questions

• The identified research questions for this project are provided below:
• What are the constituents of coconut fiber (coir)?
• What makes coconut fiber a biofilter?
• What is the method of usage of this biofilter in wastewater treatment?
• How effective is coir in wastewater treatment?
• What can coir filter out of wastewater?
• Can coir be industrially utilized in the tertiary treatment (filtration) of wastewater?

Deliverables

The deliverables of this project are a project report, influent of wastewater sample, the effluent of filtered wastewater sample through coir, as well as results and comparison. The influent and effluent would be tested for physical, chemical, and biological parameters of wastewater according to WHO and national standards and would be compared to the calculated efficiency and treatment rate of coir. Also, the report should contain complete documentation of the laboratory experiment procedure from start to finish, how various process variables were gotten, how the physical, chemical, and biological parameters were tested and the instruments used for the test, as well as how the biofilter was used and how the results were gotten.

Relevance

This project mainly focuses on the assessment of the usage of coconut fiber (coir), a material regarded as agricultural waste in the tertiary treatment of wastewater. In simple terms, using waste to treat waste.

Methodology

This project focuses on secondary research and laboratory experiments. They are discussed below:

Secondary research

The secondary research in this project will utilize a systematic approach (Johnson et al., 2016) to review the works of literature. The steps involved in the systematic review of the literature are provided below:

Step 1: Identify the research questions that can be used for the project.

Step 2: Identify the keywords that should be used to research the works of literature.

Step 3: Extract the journals and books that are appropriate for this project.

Step 4: Write the literature review chapter.

Laboratory experiments

The laboratory experiments would cover a large part of this project. They would be carried out in stages, and as such described below;

• Stage 1: Collecting coconut fiber (coir) from farm and market sources
• Stage 2: Drying, processing, and preparing the biofilter
• Stage 3: Collection of wastewater sample that has undergone primary treatment.
• Stage 4: Developing an appropriate process route and optimal equipment arrangement for an efficient process setup for the treatment.
• Stage 5: Testing water sample for physical, chemical, and biological parameters
• Stage 5: Carrying out the filtration/treatment process
• Stage 6: Testing and analyzing the treatment process result of the effluent
• Stage 7: Drawing inferences and conclusions from results.

Evaluation

The risk assessment conducted for this project is provided in the table below:

Table 1:  Risk assessment

Schedule

Table 2: Project Plan

References

Adu-Ahyiah, M. and Anku, R. E. (2010). “Small Scale Wastewater Treatment in Ghana (a Scenario)” Retrieved, 03-10-2010:1-6

Amoatey Peace (Mrs.) and Professor Richard Bani (2011). Wastewater Management. Waste Water - Evaluation and Management, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, University of Ghana, Ghana.

Benetti, A.D. 2008. Water reuse: issues, technologies, and applications. Engenharia Sanitaria eAmbiental, 13(3), 247-248.

Day,  D.  (1996).  How  Australian social policy neglects environments.  Australian  Journal of  Soil and Water  Conservation,  9:  3-9.

Dhote, J., Ingoleb, S. and Chavhana, A., 2012. REVIEW ON WASTEWATER TREATMENT TECHNOLOGIES. International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) ISSN: 2278-0181, Vol. 1(Issue 5).

Johnson, D., Deterding, S., Kuhn, K.A., Staneva, A., Stoyanov, S., and Hides, L., 2016. Gamification for health and wellbeing: A systematic review of the literature. Internet interventions, 6, pp.89-106.

Korfali S.I. and Jurdi M. (2011). Suitability of surface water for domestic water use: Awali River case study.   European Waters 35, 3-12,2011.

Melidis P., Vaiopoulou E., Aivasidis A., An activated sludge treatment plant for integrated removal of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, Desalination, Volume 211, Issues 1–3, 2007, Pages 192-199, ISSN 0011-9164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.desal.2006.02.092.

Metcalf and Eddy, Inc. (1991) “Wastewater Engineering”: Treatment Disposal and Reuse, third edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Metcalf and Eddy, Inc. (2003) “Wastewater Engineering: Treatment and Reuse,” Fourth edition.: McGraw-Hill, New York.

Myint M., Nirmalakhandan N., and Speece R.E., (2007). Anaerobic fermentation of cattle manure: Modeling of hydrolysis and acidogenesis, Water Research, Volume 41, Issue 2, Pages 323-332, ISSN 0043-1354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2006.10.026.

Peavy, S. H., Rowe, D. R. and Tchobanoglous, G., (1985) Environmental Engineering, International Edition MacGraw-Hill 207-322.

Qadir M., Wichelns D., Raschid-Sally L., McCornick P.G., Drechsel P., Bahri A., Minhas P.S. The challenges of wastewater irrigation in developing countries, Agricultural Water Management, Volume 97, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 561-568, ISSN 0378-3774. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2008.11.004.

Welch, E.B., & Naczk, F. (1992). Ecological Effects of Waste Water: Applied limnology and pollutant effects, Second Edition (2nd ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203038499

Last updated: Jan 04, 2022 12:37 PM