Advanced Treatment of Landfill Leachate Effluent Using Membrane Filtration

Treatment of water by membrane filtration process has been well established. However, its application on landfill leachate effluent treatment is quite limited. This study was undertaken to investigate suitability of this process on leachate effluent treatment generated from Pulau Burung semi aerobic sanitary landfill. Three types of membrane namely Nylon, Resin and Poly-propylene (PP) were used in this study. The pore sizes were 1 ?m and 5 ?m. The effects of different filtration rates on leachate treatment were studied. The parameters studied were COD, colour, suspended solids (SS) and turbidity. A set of batch studies were carried out in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the membrane filtration process in leachate effluent treatment. The results indicated that Poly-propylene membrane with pore size 1 ?m had the best performance in reducing all the parameters whereas the Resin membrane gave the poorest results. It can be deduced that the filtration rate of 10 mL/min exhibited the highest removal efficiency. Poly-propylene membrane with pore size 1 ?m and at filtration rate of 10 mL/min was found to be the most effective membrane to remove COD, colour, SS and turbidity.