Aluminum recovery from water treatment sludges

Aluminum sulfate and polyaluminum chloride are widely used as coagulants in water treatment plants. A chemical sludge containing aluminium hydroxide, adsorbed organic matter and other water insoluble impurities is obtained after the flocculation-clarification process. In Portugal, an estimated amount of 66 000 ton/yr. (wet wt.) water treatment sludge is being disposed of on land or at municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills. Government restrictions to this practice as well as increasing deposition costs and the potential harmful impacts proceeding from the high aluminium content of the sludge have been leading to significant research efforts in order to evaluate different treatment alternatives, namely involving aluminium recovery and subsequent reuse. Despite membrane-based separation and liquid ion ex-change processes have been studied for that purpose, the traditional acidic and alkaline extraction methods may be still explored to obtain a product susceptible of use as coagulant for industrial waste-water treatment purposes. Centrifuged chemical sludge from a water treatment plant using polyaluminium chloride as coagulant was characterised in terms of humidity, volatile matter, Al, Fe, Mn, Cd, Cu, Cr, Pb, Ni and Zn. The dry sludge organic content is about 29% and the major elements determined are aluminium (~ 12.6%), iron (~ 2%) and manganese (~ 0.14%). The aluminium recovery was investigated both by acidic and alkaline leaching processes. Concentrated H2SO4 was selected as the acidic leaching medium and the process efficiency was evaluated at different operating conditions. The ratio dry sludge/sulphuric acid solution was varied between 0.5 and 2%, the pH ranged from 1.0 to 4.5, different stirring and settling times were established and the aluminium, iron and manganese dissolution was assessed. A similar study was performed at pH values between 10.0 and 13.6 using 2N/10N NaOH as the extracting solution and operating conditions as those of the acid extraction procedure. Whereas maximum alu-minium recovery using H2SO4 was about 61% at pH=1.0, the alkaline extraction led to aluminium recoveries of about 71% at pH = 13.6 (2% dry sludge in suspension, 90 min stirring time and 45 min settling time). Decreasing the sludge dosage to 0.5%, aluminium extraction increased to 87.4% at pH=13. As expected, acid extraction led to a higher Fe (18.2%) and Mn (42.1%) dissolution as com-pared with alkaline extraction at pH=13.6 (Fe=2.1% and Mn=3.2%).