World’s leading textile producer China has opened its first ever plant that uses electron beams to treat industrial wastewater in vast textile dyeing industry, ushering in a new era for radiation technology. The new plant in Jinhua city, 300 kilometres south of Shanghai, will treat 1,500 cubic metres of wastewater per day, around a sixth of the plant’s output.
Jianlong Wang, Deputy Director of Nuclear and Energy Technology Institute at Tsinghua University, Beijing and the principal researcher behind the project, commented, “Chinese researchers have benefited from the advice of experts from Hungary, Korea and Poland in the adoption of the technology and the construction of the plant.”
Explaining the technology, Wang elaborated that bacteria are the workhorses of wastewater treatment as they digest and break down pollutants. Wastewater from textile dyeing contains molecules that cannot be treated with bacteria. It can contain more than 70 complex chemicals that do not easily degrade hence to break these complex chemicals into smaller molecules, which, in turn, can be treated and removed using normal biological processes, electron beams are used by irradiating. Irradiation is done using short-lived reactive radicals than can interact with a wide range of pollutants and break them down.
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Before opting for radiation technology using electron beams, Chinese researchers had run an extensive set of feasibility experiments using the effluent from the plant, comparing electron beam technology with other methods. “Electron beam technology was the clear winner as both the more ecological and more effective option,” Wang added.
It’s worth mentioning here the textile dyeing accounts for a fifth of all industrial wastewater pollution generated worldwide and lots of wastewater goes untreated.
