Environmentalist (2008) 28:289–296
DOI 10.1007/s10669-007-9142-4
Wastewater management in small- and medium-size
enterprises: case studies
Sohair I. Abou-Elela Æ Fayza A. Nasr Æ
Saber A. El-Shafai
Published online: 12 October 2007
Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007
Abstract Wastewater management in small and
medium-sized enterprises representing the chemical and
food industries was investigated. The results showed that
wastewater discharged from an ink-production factory was
highly contaminated with organic pollutants. Anaerobic
biological treatment followed by chemical coagulation using
ferric chloride aided with lime proved to be very effective
and produced an effluent that complied with national regu-
latory standard for wastewater discharge into public sewage
network. Also, management of wastewater from a confec-
tionery factory representing the food sector was carried out.
Aerobic biological treatment using plastic-packed trickling
filter proved to be an effective treatment method. However,
application of in-plant control measures alleviated the
requirement for the construction of a wastewater treatment
plant. The applied pollution prevention and cleaner pro-
duction measures involved good housekeeping, recovery of
spent chocolate, modification of floor cleaning and installa-
tion of suction devices for the removal of sugar and starch
powders. All improvement measures were documented by
cost/benefit analysis.
Keywords Biological treatment
Chemical industry

Chemical treatment
Food industry
In-plant control

Small- and medium-sized enterprises
Trickling
filter
Waste minimization
S. I. Abou-Elela
F. A. Nasr
S. A. El-Shafai (&)
Water Pollution Research Department, National Research
Centre, Cairo, Egypt
e-mail: saberabdelaziz@hotmail.com
1 Introduction
Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an
important role in production, innovation and employ-
ment creation. SMEs are enterprises classified as having
fewer than 50 employees; make up 80–90% of all
industrial establishments in most countries (Behnsen et al.
2002). Although SMEs constitute the backbone of an
economy, they also account for the bulk of human
resources use and polluting activities of the environment.
In order to compete with larger enterprises in the market,
SMEs should perceive environment-oriented management,
regard as cost intensive that hampers innovation and
development. Competition for capital and new investment
opportunities is driving the environmental performance of
SMEs in the 21st century. Achieving this objective
requires financial performance and a commitment to
innovation and best practice. Also, sustainability-driven
companies achieve their business goals by integrating
economic, environmental and social growth opportunities
in a pro-active, cost-effective and responsible manner
today, so they will outpace their competitors and be
tomorrow’s winners.
In Egypt, SMEs represent a major portion of the
enterprises employing a workforce of fewer than 50
people are responsible for some 80% of all employment
in Egypt. Although individually their environmental
impact may not be great, their cumulative impact is
substantial. Therefore, integrating environmental man-
agement into their system becoming a business given and
is a requirement according to the national environmental
laws. To achieve such goals, the implementation of
pollution-prevention measures, cleaner production and
low-cost treatment technologies are required (Abou-Elela
2002).
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Wastewater produced from chemical industry usually
contaminated with high organic and inorganic pollutants
such as acids, bases, organic compounds and matters that
are high in chemical oxygen demand, colour, and low
suspended solids. Many materials in the chemical industry
are toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic or simply hardly bio-
degradable. In chemical industry, the high variability,
stringent effluent permits, and extreme operating condi-
tions define the practice of wastewater treatment (Bury
et al. 2002). Hu et al. (1999) proposed a concept to select
the appropriate treatment process for chemical industrial
wastewater based on molecular size and biodegradability
of the pollutants (Hu et al. 1999). Chemical industrial
wastewater can be treated by some biological oxidation
methods such as trickling filters, rotating biological cont-
actor (RBC), activated sludge, or lagoons (Nemerow and
Dasgupta 1991; Jobbagy et al. 2000). Pollutants with a
molecular size larger than 10,000–20,200, can be treated by
coagulation followed by sedimentation or flotation (Hu
et al. 1999). Waste minimization in the production process
in chemical industry is the first and most important step to
avoid waste formation during production (Carini 1999;
Alvarez et al. 2004).
In the food sector, processing wastewater is charac-
terized with high-strength organic and nutrient contents.
These organic wastes are biodegradable in nature and
could be handled by the microorganisms. Biological
treatment is widely used for food-processing wastewater
either by using anaerobic (Moises et al. 2001; Moody
and Raman 2001) aerobic or combination of both
(Austermann-Haun et al. 1999; Mulkerrins et al. 2004).
Anaerobic wastewater treatment using high-rate anaerobic
reactor was successfully applied in the seasonal vegeta-
ble-processing industry (Rintala and Lepistö 1997) and
the fruit juice industry (Austermann-Haun et al. 1997).
The high-rate UASB reactor was successfully used for
potato-chips wastewater treatment with an organic loading
rate up to 4.4 kg BOD/m3day (El-Gohary et al. 1999).
Historical review of the rocky or trickling filter provides
the advantages of the system for the treatment of all kind
of biodegradable wastewater. The system could be used
either for organic carbon removal or both organic carbon
removal and nitrification of nitrogen (Tchobanoglous
et al. 2003).
The specific objective of the present study was to
evaluate the use of alternative methods for waste minimi-
zation and/or treatment of wastewater produced from
chemical and food industries. However, the long-term
objective, aimed at identifying environmental-management
products services that can assist SMEs to obtain economic
and environmental sustainability and to establish a dem-
onstration program so it can be implemented a cross similar
enterprises.
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Environmentalist (2008) 28:289–296
2 Materials and methods
Two small- and medium sized enterprises representing
chemical and food industrial sectors were selected for this
study. The plants are located in a new industrial city called
Badr located in the eastern part of Cairo. Industrial auditing
including plant activities, industrial processes, and envi-
ronmental situation was carried out to identify the main
sources of pollutants in order to apply any possible in-plant
control measures such as good housekeeping, pollution
prevention, raw materials recovery, wastewater recycling
and reuse. Composite samples from the different depart-
ments and the end-off-pipe were collected. Physico-
chemical analyses covered temperature, pH, chemical
oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand
(BOD), total suspended solids (TSS), settle-able solids,
nitrogenous compounds, total phosphorus, oil and grease
and total sulphides were carried out according to the APHA
(1998). Laboratory experiments were carried out to select
the appropriate treatment method. Chemical treatment was
studied using Jar test. The coagulant used was ferric
chloride aided with lime. Biological treatment using a
plastic-packed trickling filter consists of a non-transparent
hard PVC tube with 142-cm working length and 14.4-cm
inner diameter coupled with a settling basin of 1-l capacity.
A motor-driven circular plastic plate 12 cm in diameter
located at the top of the trickling filter was used to
homogeneously distribute the wastewater on the top of the
packing material (Tchobanoglous et al. 2003). The waste-
water moves down to the tricking filter, passing through the
attached biofilm on the surface of the plastic media. The
packing material is composed of corrugated cylindrical
plastic tubes of 1.5 cm diameter and 2 cm length. The
corrugated tubes provide high surface area for the attached
biofilm, 435 m2/m3 (Fig. 1). The settling time in these
sedimentation basin is 4.8 h. As another alternative to the
Trickling filter motor
14.4 cm
Plastic packing
material
Influent
Effluent
Sludge
Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of the plastic-packed trickling filter