Abstract
Tannery wastewater represents a serious environmental and technological problem mainly because it contains large amounts of refractory compounds, salts, ammonia, and surfactants. The objective of this work was to develop an economical long-term continuous method to enhance the treatment of tannery wastewaters. This paper reports a promising laboratory-scale performance of an innovative process, which is the combination of biological degradation, carried out on a glass column, with chemical treatment using lime and alum at optimum conditions. The latter step is aimed at simplifying the chemical structure of recalcitrant organic substances for enhancing their biodegradability. This study wits carried out on a real final effluents coming from a centralized plant treating wastewater produced by nine different tanneries in Egypt.