Characterization and biological treatability of edible oil wastewaters

This study investigates the conventional characterization and biological treatability of two different wastewaters that originated from corn oil and sunflower oil refining processes. Our aims for characterization of wastewaters included: total and soluble chemical oxygen demand, total and soluble biological oxygen demand, suspended solid, oil and grease, pH, total kjeldahl nitrogen, ammonia nitrogen, total phosphor, phosphate, color and sulfate analyses. In corn oil wastewaters, total COD is portioned as 80% soluble COD, 20% particular COD, 3.4% total soluble inert COD, 0.5% total particular inert COD, whereas in sunflower oil wastewaters soluble COD, particular COD, total soluble inert COD, total particular inert COD are found as 81.7%, 18.3%, 1.9%, and 5.1%, respectively. In our characterization studies, BOD5/COD ratio were 0.15 and 0.2 for corn oil and sunflower oil wastewaters, respectively. These results indicate that wastewaters are not suitable for biological treatment. But investigation of COD fractions has pointed out that wastewaters contain mostly biodegradable organic substances.