Characterization of organics in pulp and paper mill effluents before and after physicochemical treatment

Abstract

The efficiencies with which different physicochemical treatment methods removed colour, turbidity and TOC were determined for a number of pulp and paper mill effluent samples. Additional information was obtained by fractionation of the organic compounds within the samples, both before and after treatment. XAD resin adsorption was used to separate the organics into hydrophilic and hydrophobic fractions. Flow field‐flow fractionation was used to obtain molecular weight distributions. The data indicate that coagulation based methods are particularly successful at removing high molecular weight hydrophobic compounds, whilst adsorption processes also remove the low molecular weight hydrophilic compounds.