Almost any industry today has one or more sources of effluent waste water which can be a mixture of few or several contaminants, which in most cases are toxic in nature. Although some industries have adopted the zero-discharge policy by recycling the water for internal reuse or gardening, some others still redirect their effluent streams directly into the environmental waters such as rivers, lakes and oceans. In any case, activated carbon plays an important role in removing or reducing the level of contaminants required as per specifications.

Activated carbon filtration can be utilized as a separate unit process. It may be placed after various physicochemical treatment steps such as coagulation/clarification, filtration, and dissolved air flotation. Another alternative is to use activated carbon adsorption prior to biological treatment to remove compounds which might be toxic to a biological system. However, the most widely adopted procedure is to place activated carbon adsorption as a tertiary or advanced treatment step subsequent to biological treatment for removal of refractory organics. In common practice, GAC can be used to adsorb residual contaminants in tertiary treatment systems.

Treatment of waste waters can be also carried out using powdered carbons independently but only in specific cases. In the most common technology, PAC is used together with activated sludge. Processes taking place in aerated tanks holding PAC and the activated sludge result in both the adsorption of non-biodegradable organics and improvement of the entire biological process through fixing bacteria on the carbon surface

The use of carbon filtration significantly reduces chemical oxygen demand (COD) in waste waters. Removal of heavy metals via adsorption on activated carbon is also possible. The removal of mercury (II) from waste water by a number of different commercial activated carbons originated from various manufacturers. Activated carbon is one of the most commonly used media for dye removal.

Other examples of carbon filtration in waste water treatments include an effective controlling of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) emissions from the semiconductor manufacturing processes, purification of waste waters in the paper industry.

SpaceBlack Adsorbents has good range of granular and powder activated carbon which can be used for treatment of industrial wastewater. Some of the common contaminants for which our carbons can be used are organic compounds (COD & BOD), colour and odour compounds, industrial chemicals, surfactants, pesticides, aromatic hydrocarbons (such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, phenol, etc.), organic halides, etc.