Utilization of Textile Effluent Waste Sludge in Brick Production

Abstract

Textile industry is one of the oldest and largest sectors in India. The exports for the year 2007-08 stood up to $20.5 billion. Even it is a value adding industry, it has several environmental impacts causing land and water pollution with toxicity. Effluent sludge waste management becomes a big problem nowadays. Except engineered landfills, rest of the methods for dumping, leads ground water contamination and there by other socio-economic impacts. Many studies have been conducted in this area and reported that the pollution level is high in ground water and nuisance due to dumping in the treatment plant area premises. There is a growing need to find alternative solutions for the sludge management. In the present study, an attempt has been made to utilize the textile ETP sludge (dry) in making of construction materials. Even to analyze the sludge, process variables for particular sludge generation can be studied. For inducing strength materials like fly ash, silica fume can be used. Textile sludge was incorporated in fly ash brick manufacturing and it was observed that with increase in sludge content, there is a decrease in compressive strength of bricks. Pulverized and sieved bricks show better compressive strength when compared with pulverized form and grinded form. There is increase in compressive strength with increase in sand, fly ash, cement and quarry dust proportion.