Textile effluent & waste water: a review

Textile processing is a growing industry that traditionally has used a lot of water, energy and harsh chemicals. Textile industries consume over 7 x 105 tons of dyes annually and use up to 1 litre of water per kg of dye processed and arethird largest polluters in the world. As a characteristic of the textile processing industry, a wide range of structurally diverse dyes can be used in a single factory, and therefore effluents from the industry are extremely variable in composition. This needed for a largely unspecific process for treating textile waster water.

Treatment methods that were perfectly acceptable in the past may not be suitable today or in thefuture.Some of the enzymes that are currently known in biotechnological processes such asamylases and proteases that are being used in the synthetic and biochemical reactionshave evolved over millions of years to become efficient and selective for specificreactions taking place in living systems.Research on biological treatmenthas offered simple and cost effective ways of bioremediating textile effluents.

Biotechnology can be used in new production processes that are themselves less polluting than the traditional processes. Waste treatment is probably the biggest industrial application of biotechnology. The aims of this study represents a review of enzyme applications in bioremediating textile dyeand their effluents.The aim is to provide the textile technologist with an understanding of enzymes and their use with textile materials.