Industrial wastewater treatment in constructed wetlands packed with construction materials and agricultural by-products

This paper reports pollutant removal performances from mixed industrial wastewater employing subsurface flow constructed wetland systems in Bangladesh. Two parallel hybrid wetland trains were established; each train included a vertical flow (VF) followed by a horizontal flow (HF) wetland. One hybrid system was packed with construction materials (i.e. recycled bricks), whereas the other system included agricultural by-products (i.e. sugarcane bagasse). All wetland units were planted with Canna indica. The hybrid trains were operated under non recirculation and recirculation phases; input hydraulic loading across each VF system ranged between 219.3 and 438.0 mm/d. Mean nitrogen, organics, solids, phosphorus and color removals across the hybrid systems were 67.5–80.0, 74.0–85.0, 55.0–95.0, 64.0–89.0 and 46.0–83.0% respectively. Lower input biodegradation ratio influenced organics removal routes…