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Development of an Environmentally Sustainable Approach for Safe Disposal of Arsenic-Rich Sludge

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Handbook of Environmental Materials Management

Abstract

Arsenic contamination in groundwater has been reported by many researchers from different parts of the world. In West Bengal, arsenic contamination in groundwater was first detected in 1983 when a few patients with arsenicosis reported at the School of Tropical Medicine, Kolkata. Today, arsenic contamination in groundwater is found to be affecting 82 blocks of eight districts of West Bengal, namely, Maldah, Murshidabad, Nadia, North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Burdwan, Hooghly, and Howrah, and also in 11 municipal areas and 18 non-municipal outgrowth areas.

Providing safe drinking water to people in rural community is a major challenge in arsenic-affected areas in and around the world. One of the options for supplying arsenic-free and potable water is to remove arsenic from contaminated groundwater, and the second option is to provide potable water filtered from surface water system by various mechanical filtration technologies. Both these options involve a huge amount of cost and manpower and adaptation of suitable engineering methods and economically feasible solutions. On the other hand, arsenic removal processes generate arsenic-rich sludge which requires safe disposal as because the sludge becomes hazardous.

Disposal of arsenic-rich sludge generated from contaminated water by the method of coprecipitation and adsorption is a major environmental concern. Qualitatively arsenic-rich sludge is hazardous, and uncontrolled disposal may lead to environmental degradation. In order to stabilize arsenic-rich sludge, it was mixed in different proportions with cement concrete and clay soil. In the first phase of the experiment, the compressive strength of the concrete cubes and bricks was analyzed, and toxicity characteristic leaching test was conducted to determine the quantity of arsenic in the leachate. In the second phase, injection of the sludge into bench-scale anaerobic bioreactors was carried out to monitor the stabilization of arsenic-rich sludge. The toxicity characteristic leaching test for all the concrete cubes and bricks indicated the presence of arsenic concentration in leachate within the permissible limit. The study showed that arsenic-rich sludge could be potentially disposed through environmentally friendly manner by mixing with cement concrete and bricks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Water Resources Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Pankaj Kumar Roy, Arunabha Majumder, Somnath Pal, Gourab Banerjee & Asis Mazumdar

  2. Women’s College, Calcutta, Kolkata, India

    Malabika Biswas Roy

  3. PWD (Water Resources), Agartala, Tripura, India

    Jayanta Debbarma

Authors
  1. Pankaj Kumar Roy
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  2. Arunabha Majumder
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  3. Somnath Pal
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  4. Gourab Banerjee
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  5. Malabika Biswas Roy
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  6. Jayanta Debbarma
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  7. Asis Mazumdar
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Correspondence to Pankaj Kumar Roy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Chemistry and EVSC, New Jersey InstTech, 151 D Tiernan-NJIT Dept. of Chemistry and EVSC, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA

    Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain

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Roy, P.K. et al. (2018). Development of an Environmentally Sustainable Approach for Safe Disposal of Arsenic-Rich Sludge. In: Hussain, C. (eds) Handbook of Environmental Materials Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58538-3_14-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58538-3_14-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58538-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58538-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Chemistry and Mat. ScienceReference Module Physical and Materials ScienceReference Module Chemistry, Materials and Physics

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