Treatment of stabilised landfill leachate using bio-coagulant azadirachta indica

Municipal solid waste production increases every day. On top of that, leachate contamination to the groundwater and river is uncontrollable, due to poor municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill management. Landfill leachate has high quantities of COD, pH, ammonia nitrogen, turbidity, and heavy metals, as well as a strong colour and foul odour, dumping it directly into a body of water or the environment endangers the ecology and human health. Therefore, serious attention on identifying and providing an effective landfill leachate treatment is certainly needed. The goal of this research is to assess how well perform of bio-coagulant Azadirachta Indica (b-Ai) as coagulant in coagulation-flocculation process for landfill leachate treatment at different experimental conditions. Additionally, the performance of conventional coagulant which are alum and natural zeolite will also be experimented and compared with b-Ai removal. Parameter of turbidity removal will be used as indicator to evaluate the performance of the coagulants. The experimental data showed that, the optimum removal of turbidity using b-Ai was achieved up to 26% at experiment condition of b-Ai dosage 0.1 g, pH 8 and reaction time 5 min, 15 min and 30 min for rapid, slow and settlement, respectively. Additionally, the performance of conventional coagulant which are alum, and another natural coagulant name natural zeolite was also experimented and compared with b-Ai performance. According to the data obtained, alum recorded the highest removal of turbidity which is 96% compared to natural zeolite, 52% and b-Ai at optimum condition, respectively. However, the usage of alum alone has created secondary pollutant, which is harmful toward the environment and human health, therefore, the study on using natural coagulant or flocculant to reduce the amount of chemical coagulant (alum) consume in leachate treatment is needed. Based on the finding obtained in this study, b-Ai has potential to coagulate the pollutant, but it is less effective to work as a sole coagulant especially in high pollutant strength of sample like leachate. Therefore, further study on the potential of b-Ai as coagulant aid or flocculant is proposed