The influence of agro-industrial effluents on River Nile pollution

Abstract

The major agro-industrial effluents of sugarcane and starch industries pose a serious threat to surface waters. Their disposal in the River Nile around Cairo city transitionally affected the microbial load. In situ bacterial enrichment (50-180%) was reported and gradually diminished downstream; the lateral not vertical effect of the effluent disposal was evident. Disposed effluents increased BOD and COD, and then progressively decreased downstream. Ammoniacal N was elevated, indicating active biological ammonification and in situ biodegradability of the effluents. In vitro, the nitrogen-fixing rhizobacteria Crysomonas luteola, Azospirillum spp., Azomonas spp. and K. pneumoniae successfully grew in batch cultures prepared from the crude effluents. This was supported by adequate growth parameters and organic matter decomposition. Therefore, such biodegradability of the tested agro-industrial effluents strongly recommends their use for microbial biomass necessary for the production of bio-preparates.

Recent Developments in Environmental Photocatalytic Degradation of Organic Pollutants: The Case of Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles—A Review

“…Industrial development is directly related to the release of various toxic pollutants into the environment, especially to aqueous streams, and these pollutants are harmful and hazardous to the environment [12,[39][40][41]. Prevention of industrial pollution is currently a major focus of environmentalists and therefore treatment of industrial effluents before disposal into the ecosystem is imperative to protect human life and environmental quality [3,40,42]. Thus, a constant effort to protect water resources is being made by various government and nongovernmental organisations (e.g., US EPA, WHO, and DWAF) through the introduction of increasingly strict legislation covering pollutant release into the environment, with particular emphasis on liquid industrial effluents [5,40,43,44].…”

“…However, studies to characterise leachate originating from these landfills have indicated that leachates contain hazardous pollutants like arsenides, PCBs, and sulfanilamides [14,16,55,56]. Commonly used pesticides from agricultural activities (either domestic or large commercial scale) have high recalcitrant organic groups and hence are extremely difficult to break down through normal degradation [2,38,42,57]. Also, the use of nitrogencontaining fertilisers causes acidification and eutrophication of ecosystems due to leaching [44,58,59].…”

Current Situation of Water Pollution and Its Effect on Aquatic Life in Egypt

“…Egypt faces a rapidly increasing deterioration of its surface and groundwater due to increasing discharges of heavily polluted domestic and industrial effluents into its waterways (Ali et al;. There are estimated to be some 24,000 industrial enterprises in Egypt, about 700 of which are major industrial facilities (Ezzat et al;.…”

Chemometrics analysis for investigation of retention behavior of hazardous compounds in effluents

“…Parameters such as pH, dissolved oxygen, BOD, COD, TOC, TDS, and TSS are generally used for evaluation of effluent quality. However, these parameters cannot be used for evaluation of toxicity effect on receiving waters due to some specific defects (Kannan and Upreti 2008;Ali et al 2011;Kaur et al 2010). The chemical analysis of an effluent (a municipal or industrial wastewater) cannot by itself predict its potential toxic effect.…”

“…The toxicity of many chemicals is unknown even when they can be detected. Organic pollution occurs when an excess of organic matter, such as manure or sewage, enters the effluents (Ali et al 2011;Kaur et al 2010). Different chemicals combined together in the same effluent can have unknown additive effects even when the toxicity of each individual chemical is well known.…”