Characterization and treatment of wastewater from food processing industry: A review

The food processing industry contributes to economic growth and makes food more available. Wastewaters discharged from food industries need to be characterized often for their compliance to standards by regulatory authorities. In order to reduce environmental pollution, these industries use different treatment methods to treat their wastewater. Characterization of wastewater helps in developing various treatment methods among which are biological techniques, advanced oxidation process (AOP), and more recently adsorption. The biological treatment and AOP have undergone several investigations in the past few years and have advantages ranging from low operation cost to no waste product but not as efficient as adsorption which has low operation cost and high efficiency. This review focuses on works been done on characterization as well as the treatment of wastewater from food processing industry.