Landfill leachate treatment by high-pressure membranes and advanced oxidation techniques with a focus on ecotoxicity and by-products management: A review

The increasing worldwide contamination of freshwater systems with thousands of industrial and natural chemical compounds is one of the key environmental problems facing humanity. Although most of these compounds are present at low concentrations, many of them raise considerable toxicological concerns, particularly when present as components of complex mixtures. Here we review three scientific challenges in addressing water-quality problems caused by such micropollutants. First, tools to assess the impact of these pollutants on aquatic life and human health must be further developed and refined. Second, cost-effective and appropriate remediation and water-treatment technologies must be explored and implemented. Third, usage and disposal strategies, coupled with the search for environmentally more benign products and processes, should aim to minimize introduction of critical pollutants into the aquatic environment.

Over the past few years, antibiotics have been considered emerging pollutants due to their continuous input and persistence in the aquatic ecosystem even at low concentrations. They have been detected worldwide in environmental matrices, indicating their ineffective removal from water and wastewater using conventional treatment methods. To prevent this contamination, several processes to degrade/remove antibiotics have been studied. This review addresses the current state of knowledge concerning the input sources, occurrence and mainly the degradation and removal processes applied to a specific class of micropollutants, the antibiotics. In this paper, different remediation techniques were evaluated and compared, such as conventional techniques (biological processes, filtration, coagulation, flocculation and sedimentation), advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), adsorption, membrane processes and combined methods. In this study, it was found that ozonation, Fenton/photo-Fenton and semiconductor photocatalysis were the most tested methodologies. Combined processes seem to be the best solution for the treatment of effluents containing antibiotics, especially those using renewable energy and by-products materials. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In most countries, sanitary landfilling is nowadays the most common way to eliminate municipal solid wastes (MSW). In spite of many advantages, generation of heavily polluted leachates, presenting significant variations in both volumetric flow and chemical composition, constitutes a major drawback. Year after year, the recognition of landfill leachate impact on environment has forced authorities to fix more and more stringent requirements for pollution control. This paper is a review of landfill leachate treatments. After the state of art, a discussion put in light an opportunity and some results of the treatment process performances are given. Advantages and drawbacks of the various treatments are discussed under the items: (a) leachate transfer, (b) biodegradation, (c) chemical and physical methods and (d) membrane processes. Several tables permit to review and summarize each treatment efficiency depending on operating conditions. Finally, considering the hardening of the standards of rejection, conventional landfill leachate treatment plants appear under-dimensioned or do not allow to reach the specifications required by the legislator. So that, new technologies or conventional ones improvements have been developed and tried to be financially attractive. Today, the use of membrane technologies, more especially reverse osmosis (RO), either as a main step in a landfill leachate treatment chain or as single post-treatment step has shown to be an indispensable means of achieving purification.