Horizontal Flow Floating Treatment Wetlands (HFFTWs) for Reclaiming Safer Irrigation Water from Tannery Effluent

Untreated tannery wastewater (UTW) poses unprecedented threats to the aquatic and irrigation systems due to severely limited pollution removal efficiency (RE %) by the limited capacity and design of wastewater treatment plants in developing countries. An exploitation of treatment wetlands (TWs) like floating treatment wetlands (FTWs) face hydraulic performance and survivability and establishment challenges of transplanted hydrophytes in the severely toxic UTW. Such challenges were overcome by designing a horizontal flow floating treatment wetland (HFFTW) and diluting UTW at 0, 25, 50, and 75 with harvested rainwater (HRW), viz. UTW:HRW (% v:v) for lowering phytotoxicity to the phytotolerance range of the tested hydrophytes, viz. Eichhornia crassipes (EC) and Pistia stratiotes (PS) in the HFFTW, i.e., EC-HFFTW and PS-HFFTW. Both hydrophytes showed heavy metals&rsquo: translocation factor being &ge:1, i.e., and acted as excellent hyperaccumulators of heavy metals. The average metal RE (%) was 64 (Cr), 61 (Cd), 45 (Pb), 44 (Cu), and 50.1 (BOD) for E. crassipes, and 44 (Cr), 54 (Cd), 42.2 (Pb), 42 (Cu), and 40 (BOD) for P. stratiotes. Significant reductions in the organic pollution load witnessed by significant drops in BOD and COD made UTW a safer irrigation medium for Petunia hybrida while inducing an increase in the bioconcentration factor (BCF) of PS and EC. The study concluded that the designed HFFTW showed significantly greater RE (%) and yield of reclaimed water than conventional FTWs based on its hydraulic performance. The design HFFTW carries a field scale application capacity for improvising treatment efficiency of the combined effluent plant of KTWMA (Kasur Tannery Waste Management Agency), Kasur, Pakistan.