Treatment of Slaughterhouse Wastewater with A Novel UASB-Activated Sludge Treatment Unit

In China, the discharge requirements for wastewater from slaughterhouses is tightly regulated, with discharge requirements to surface waters of no hogher than 70 mg/L for COD, 60 mg/L for TSS and ammonia nitrogen limited to 15 mg/L. The meat industry is one of the highest producers of industrial wastewater as abundant water is required in many processing steps as well as in maintaining the high standards of cleanliness and sanitation in the plant. We recently reported the successful treatment of a high organic content wastewater from a large soy-bean processing plant in China using a novel, selfcontained upflow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor (UASB) integrated to an activated sludge system (ASR) (Ramirez and Hao, 2020). In this paper, we apply the same reactor design to a slaughterhouse generating 200 m3/hr of wastewater. The system successfully reduced key wastewater treatment parameter values below those required by the strict Chinese discharge requirements for surface waters – namely; COD ≤ 50 mg/L, Ammonia N ≤ 8 mg/L and TSS ≤ 10 mg/L.