18. An Approach for Removing Suspended Particles, Lipids, and Protein Matter from Poultry Slaughterhouse Effluent Using Dissolved Air Flotation

It is worth highlighting that as water consumption continues to grow, water management has become an essential concern and priority. One of the food sectors, such as the meat industry, requires an immense amount of water. Poultry slaughterhouses release huge volumes of wastewater into the environment. Slaughterhouse effluent has been shown to negatively impact both surface and groundwater as blood, fat, dung, urine, and meat tissues end up going into the wastewater streams during abattoir processing. As a result, an effective treatment is essential for regulating the release of organic carbon and nitrogen-containing effluent. The most frequently observed and successful technique for treating slaughterhouse wastewater is flocculation. The incorporation of flocculants into dissolved-air flotation can improve the overall effectiveness of the system. Most flocculation procedures require adding chemical flocculants to the solution, such as aluminum sulfate, ferric chloride, and polyacrylamide. This chemical approach has the disadvantages of being costly and environmentally unfriendly, in addition to being harmful to humans. These issues motivated researchers to investigate biological treatments to minimize the negative environmental impacts using several microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi, that serve as bioflocculant producers. As an outcome, bioflocculants are becoming increasingly popular as a safer alternative to chemical techniques for treating wastewater, and for that, this chapter highlights the use of bioflocculants in dissolved air flotation (DAF) for the removal of suspended particles, lipids, and proteins from poultry slaughterhouse wastewater (PSWW).