Identification of Potential Laundry Waste Generation in Yogyakarta, Solutions and Impacts

Laundry businesses that are not legal entities are growing in Yogyakarta Province and dispose of waste into the environment without processing so that it can cause harm to environmental health and public health because it has high organic and hydraulic loads, process model of anoxic oxic phase and wetlands with bath neutralization is a high-efficiency anaerobic process that can operate at high organic loads. Processing with wetland as a follow-up treatment can reduce organic contamination levels further. Therefore, this study used a process model with the combination of an anoxic-oxic phase and a wetland with a straw bath neutralization (the soaking of the straw) as a pretreatment to treat the laundry waste. The purpose of this study was to examine the potential of the process model on the effluent quality, the potential and impact of effluents as fertilizers for agricultural crops, and the fate and translocation of pollutants in rice plants. This study compared the process model with and without the straw bath neutralization as a pretreatment method. Detail Engineering Design in this study was an influent debit (Q) of liquid waste of 50cc/minute, an average hydraulic residence time in anaerobic, anoxic, and aerobic (wetland) processes of < 12 hours, 0.5-5 days, and > 53 hours, respectively with detergent organic load in the range of 42.17 mg/L - 164.11 mg/L. The results of this study showed that the quality of the effluent increased as indicated by the reduction in pollutant parameters such as BOD, COD, TSS, TDS, detergent, and total phosphate in the range of 7.39-98.17 and 7.09-95.49 in the control group (without pretreatment) and the pretreatment group, respectively. The potential and impact of effluents as fertilizers for rice plants were that they can stimulate morphological growth and vegetative development of plants and generative quantity of rice plants by producing quantity and quality of rice plant products where the control group produced a rice grain weight of 155.80 grams/0.4 m2, fate and translocation of hazardous materials of ABS surfactant (detergent) in rice grain with the content of 32.65 mg/kg, while the pretreatment group produced a rice grain weight of 75.79 grams/0.4 m2with the content of hazardous materials of ABS surfactant (detergent) of 24.80 mg/kg. The conclusion of this scientific study using the laundry waste treatment process model with the straw bath neutralization if it is scaled up and equipped with Detail Engineering Design can be used as a policy recommendation for water resource management by local regional policyholders. With the limitations of the work that has been done, the direction of future research is to try out the processing of laundry waste on a scale-up prototype or complete scale-up process model with Detail Engineering Design, to examine the hygienic effects of rice containing hazardous detergent ingredients in the process of cooking rice with water containing excessive doses of chlorine as well as to assess the Biological Exposure Index of detergents in humans. © 2023 WITPress. All rights reserved.