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Effectiveness of Treatment Technologies for Wastewater Pollution Generated by Indian Pulp Mills

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Abstract

India has a large number of paper manufacturing units, with mills varying in size of operations and type of product, scattered all over the length and breadth of the country. Present study deals with the survey of four different pulp and paper mills (Mill A, Mill B, Mill C and Mill D) in India, differing in their scale of operation as well as raw material usage. Physico-chemical characterization of wastewaters produced by different processing units like digestor house liquors, bleaching section, paper machine backwaters, combined inlet to the ETP and outlet to ETP, for all the four mills, was conducted. Different parameters like pH, Color, COD, BOD, percent Na, SAR, TDS and Total hardness were analyzed and compared. Highly significant differences were thus found between all the processing units of all four mills with p values < 0.01. This evaluation showed that though these mills have effluent treatment facilities installed in their premises, improvements are still needed to increase their efficiencies for treating the discharged wastewaters.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Biotechnology Division, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, 506, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Mall Road, Delhi, 110 007, India

    Deepa K. Tiku, Anil Kumar & Rita Kumar

  2. Department of Botany, University of Delhi, North Campus, Delhi, 110 007, India

    S. Sawhney

  3. Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology Laboratory, Department of Botany, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110 007, India

    V. P. Singh

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  1. Deepa K. Tiku
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  2. Anil Kumar
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  3. S. Sawhney
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  4. V. P. Singh
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  5. Rita Kumar
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Correspondence to Rita Kumar.

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Tiku, D.K., Kumar, A., Sawhney, S. et al. Effectiveness of Treatment Technologies for Wastewater Pollution Generated by Indian Pulp Mills. Environ Monit Assess 132, 453–466 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-006-9548-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-006-9548-3

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