Three researchers from the North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) of Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya have patented a fast, energy-efficient and low-cost process for treatment and bio-detoxification of industrial wastes contaminated with harmful azo-dye, reports The Hindu.
The ‘green process’ developed by Mihir K Sahoo, Bhauk Sinha and Rajesh N Sharan for treating waste-water from industries such as textile, leather and paint is 75 per cent faster, 40 per cent more energy-efficient and more sustainable than the existing technology, the report claimed.
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Their process has also been found to leave the discharge environmentally gentle and thus likely to be equally non-toxic to other bio-flora and fauna.
According to the trio, the traditional treatment of environmentally damaging waste-water effluents with appropriate chemicals processes such as chemical precipitation, coagulation and electro-coagulation only transfers the contaminating chemical entities and chemical groups of the waste-water to other media, thereby producing secondary wastes.
It was thus important to ascertain if the treated effluent was also benign to the biosphere (flora and fauna). Although theoretically, modern chemical remediation processes completely eliminate the pollutants from waste-water, the trio’s bio-toxicity evaluation of such effluents using Escherichia coli, or E coli based bio-toxicity assay showed that it still continued to be highly bio-toxic, the report added.
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