COMPARATIVE STUDIES ON THE EFFICIENCY OF CITRULLUS LANATUS (WATERMELON) AND MOMORDICA CHARANTIA (BITTER-GOURD) SEED POWDER IN THE BIOREMEDIATION OF THE DYE EFFLUENT.

Textile dying industries generate an enormous amount of effluent which needs a proper treatment. As previous methods were inefficient in treating them, new alternatives were needed to examine their possibilities of usage in a large scale. Adsorption to low-cost materials like seed powder is one among those alternatives which could be scaled up to treat the industrial scale level without creating an impact towards environment. This could be an added advantage for biodegradability and for easy availability. In this comparative study, we have used different concentrations of Citrullus lanatus and Momordica charantia seed powder to acquire their efficiency in some of the reducing properties like pH, TDS, TSS, chloride, alkalinity, turbidity, colour, total hardness, calcium hardness, magnesium hardness, free residual chlorine and COD. While comparing with the raw effluent it was founded that when the C. lanatus seed powder has some effectiveness in bringing down the reduction percentage of those parameters. When the seed powder combined with the Biofilter column, there occurs a change in the percentage levels of parameters such as colour, turbidity, total hardness and COD to 86.3, 74.9, 83.3, 45.2, 25.5% respectively. Finally, it was concluded that the seed powder along with the biofilter column can be used as an alternative method for treating the dye containing effluents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]