Laundry wastewater characteristics and their relationship with river water quality as an indicator of water pollution. Case study: Code Watershed, Yogyakarta

Abstract

Laundry services are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in rural and urban areas, generating high domestic waste volumes. Their growth has raised concerns about the quality of natural waters, particularly the rivers into which most laundry businesses discharge their wastewater. The research set out to study laundry wastewater characteristics and their relationship with the river water quality as water pollution indicators in Code Watershed (Indonesia). It lies in three administrative units where many human activities take place in the watershed’s upper to the lower reaches. BOD and COD of 25 sampled laundry businesses were analyzed descriptively and compared to the laundry wastewater standards stipulated in Regulation No. 7 of 2016 and the class II water quality standards issued in Governor Regulation No. 20 of 2008. The results showed that the BOD of four laundry businesses and the COD of 18 laundry businesses exceeded the predetermined standards. Overall, rivers in Code Watershed meet the class II river water criteria for BOD at three of the seven sampling points and COD at all points.

Chemical oxygen demand and biochemical oxygen demand analysis of discharge waters from laundry industry: monitoring, temporal variability, and biodegradability

“…Among anthropic activities, the industrial laundry sector is considered one of the largest users of water, and therefore one of the largest producers of wastewater (Aonghusa and Gray, 2002;Jayanto et al, 2011;Braga and Varesche, 2014;Dąbkowska, 2017;Swartz et al, 2017;Oyedotun and Ally, 2021;Alhinai, 2022;Procházková and Máša, 2022). Indeed, industrial laundries are establishments that treat linen in an industrial way by cleaning it with large quantities of water and cleaning products.…”

“…For this reason, the measurement of COD is generally coupled with that of BOD 5 because this quantity allows to evaluate the biodegradable fraction of the carbon compounds present in waters. Finally, the simultaneous measurement of these two parameters is relevant because it makes it possible to evaluate the biochemical degradation of substances in water (Jayanto et al, 2011;Morin-Crini and Crini, 2017;Swartz et al, 2017;Aguilar-Torrejón et al, 2023;Tomšič et al, 2023). The ratio of COD to BOD 5 provides a biodegradability index, which gives information on the biodegradability of water, and the source and origin of organic pollution (Ho et al, 2021).…”