Landfill Leachate Treatment Using Hybrid Up-Flow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (HUASB) Reactor

The effect of development of a country would lead to vast amount of solid wastes being produced. Malaysia as a developing country also facing a solid waste management issue particularly due to the production of landfill leachate. Leachate contains dangerous substances such as organic matters, heavy metals, nitrogen ammonia and other materials that could pollute underground water resource. In conjunction to this issue, this study was conducted to investigate the efficiency of the lab-scale Hybrid Upflow Sludge Blanket (HUASB) in treating landfill leachate. The parameters studied in this research include Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Suspended Solid (SS), Total Nitrogen (TN), and Total Phosphorus (TP). The lab-scale HUASB has been run for 30 days with sampling and analyzed for every 3 days. Results from this study show that the HUASB has a great potential in removing TP and SS as their removal efficiencies achieved were 90.60% and 80.70%, respectively. The removal of COD and BOD were slightly lower with an average of 73.70% and 64%, and the removal of TN was relatively low at only 50.32%. From the results, it was shown that the HUASB reactor has a promising capability in treating landfill leachate in particular for organic pollutants and phosphorus removal.