Nanomaterials mediated and biosorption-based photocatalytic treatment for efficient and rapid bioremediation of textile industry wastewater

The textile industry significantly contributes to toxic wastewater generation, with processing steps consuming large volumes of water and releasing hazardous dyes. These dyes, with complex aromatic structures, are stable and challenging to remove using conventional on-site treatments. Herein, the present work investigates the comparative effectiveness of various techniques for treating textile dye wastewater, including biosorption using agricultural waste, bioremediation using microbial consortia, and photocatalytic degradation. A simulated textile waste has been coated with commercial blue dye and further treated with synthesised nanoparticles of bismuth vanadate (BiVO₄). It shows an effective activity of about 65% dye degradation within 1 hour of treatment. The residual dye has adsorbed in a packed bed reactor (PBR) with different agricultural waste biomass such as rice stalk, peanut hulls, sawdust. The adsorption led to more than 80% removal of textile dyes from the dye solution. The bioremediation process has carried out to degrade the residual dyes eluting from the biomass PBR and the dye recovered by solvent from the biomass adsorbent. It has observed that the dye containing wastewater eluted from the PBR and completely degraded by microbial degradation within 24-72 hours of culture. Based on these findings, we propose a combined approach of nanomaterials enabled photocatalysis and biosorption that leverages the strengths of each method, breakdown of toxicants via photocatalysis coupled with the microbial degradation and biosorption to completely remove toxicants for releasing safe water from textile industry.