Effective Treatment System for the Leachate from a Small-Scale Municipal Waste Landfill

소규모 쓰레기 매립장 침출수의 효율적인 처리 방안에 관한 연구

This study was carried out to apply some basic physical and chemical treatment options including Fenton's oxidation, and to evaluate the performances and the characteristics of organic and nitrogen removal using lab-scale biological treatment system such as complete-mixing activated sludge and sequencing batch reactor(SBR) processes for the treatment of leachate from a municipal waste landfill in Gyeongnam province. The results were as follows: Chemical coagulation experiments using aluminium sulfate, ferrous sulfate and ferric chloride resulted in leachate CO $D_{Cr}$ removal of 32%, 23% and 21 % with optimum reaction dose ranges of 10,000～15,000 mg/$\ell$, 1,000 mg/$\ell$ and 500～2,000 mg/$\ell$, respectively. Fenton's oxidation required the optimum conditions including pH 3.5, 6 hours of reaction time, and hydrogen peroxide and ferrous sulfate concentrations of 2,000 ～ 3,000 mg/$\ell$ each with 1:1 weight ratio to remove more than 50% of COD in the leachate containing CO $D_{Cr}$ between 2,000 ～ 3,000 mg/$\ell$. Air-stripping achieved to remove more than 97% of N $H_3$-N in the leachate in spite of requiring high cost of chemicals and extensive stripping time, and, however, zeolite treatment removing 94% of N $H_3$-N showed high selectivity to N $H^{+}$ ion and much faster removal rate than air-stripping. The result from lab-scale experiment using a complete-mixing activated sludge process showed that biological treatability tended to increase more or less as HRT increased or F/M ratio decreased, and, however, COD removal efficiency was very poor by showing only 36% at HRT of 29 days. While COD removal was achieved more during Fenton's oxidation as compared to alum treatment for the landfill leachate, the ratio of BOD/COD after Fenton's oxidation considerably increased, and the consecutive activated sludge process significantly reduced organic strength to remove 50% of CO $D_{Cr}$ and 95% of BO $D_{5}$ . The SBR process was generally more capable of removing organics and nitrogen in the leachate than complete-mixing activated sludge process to achieve 74% removal of influent CO $D_{Cr}$ , 98% of BO $D_{5}$ and especially 99% of N $H_3$-N. However, organic removal rates of the SBR processes pre-treated with air-stripping and with zeolite were not much different with those without pre-treatment, and the SBR process treated with powdered activated carbon showed a little higher rate of CO $D_{Cr}$ removal than the process without any treatment. In conclusion, the biological treatment process using SBR proved to be the most applicable for the treatment of organic contents and nitrogen simultaneously and effectively in the landfill leachate.e.