Assessment Of Sawdust Activated Carbon (Sac) In The Treatment Of Aquaculture Effluent
Assessment Of Sawdust Activated Carbon (Sac) In The Treatment Of Aquaculture Effluent.
INTRODUCTION
Aquaculture can be described as the production of aquatic organisms, both plant and animal under controlled or semi-controlled conditions (Summerfelt, 2003).
However, Adewumi(2015), defined aquaculture practice in Nigeria as the rearing of fish in an enclosed and fairly shallow body of water where all its life processes is being controlled.
According to Sanjaya (2013), untreated aquaculture effluent generally contains high levels of organic material, numerous pathogenic micro-organisms, as well as nutrient and its indiscriminate discharge may lead to serious environmental and health hazards if not treated appropriately before final disposal.
Therefore, as the population increases and aquaculture practice expands, it is important to provide for an adequate waste management strategy to ensure a favourable environmental condition.
Typical wastewater from an aquaculture facility may include feaces and nutrients from excretion by aquatic animals, as well as uneaten feeds and chemicals such as drugs and cleanser residues (Boyd, 2003).
Aquacultural effluents contains dissolved and suspended solids that are basically oxygen demanding materials which makes the effluent to be high in biochemical oxygen demand(BOD) and nutrients like phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) which stems from fish excretion, feaces, and uneaten feed (Boyd, 2000).
Overtime, significant discharge of this untreated effluent into lakes, rivers, estuaries or any other receiving waters could cause adverse environmental impacts such as eutrophication. 17
Although , there is a suggestions on the re-use of aquaculture effluent (Yeo et al., 2004), which includes its use in irrigation of crops, but this has been found to be impractical in urban areas where aquaculture is striving but crop farming is done on a very small scale.
Therefore, since discharge of aquaculture effluent is inevitable, several environmental protection agencies and Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA) which advocates, educates and demonstrates responsible aquaculture practices for the industry, have recommended waste water treatment and also set an effluent discharge limit (Boyd and Gautier, 2000).
JUSTIFICATION
Boyd (2003), pointed out that aquaculture effluent has become large enough to have significant impacts on the environment, mainly in the form of eutrophication in rivers, as well as heavy metal pollution, which is supported by environmental activists and several scientists (Dierberg and Kiattisimukul, 1996; Goldburg and Triplett, 1997;
Naylor et al., 1998, 2000) whose serious concern have been the pollution of limited fresh water (Boyd and Gautier, 2000; Boyd and Tucker, 2000).
Since aquaculture effluent is being disposed indiscriminately (Omofunmi et al., 2016a), mainly because farmers see wastewater treatment as being an added expense that does not contribute to fish production. Hence, there is need to develop a viable, cost effective, and environmentally friendly means of treating fish farm effluent before its disposal.
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