Design and application of wastewater treatment plant for “pempek” food industry, Surabaya, Indonesia

Pempek is one of Indonesia’s popular traditional foods, originated from Palembang City, Sumatra, Indonesia. Tasteful pempek obtained from mackerel fish processing. As by-product of pempek processing, wastewater contain high concentration of organic and nitrogen was released to environment. COD content was measured up to 11,760mg/L, followed by BOD up to 7,996 mg/L and N total measured as NH3-N reached 454.03 mg/L. The effluent standard for fish processing wastewater sets by East Java Government were 150 mg/L for COD, 100 mg/L for BOD and 5 mg/L for NH3-N. A challenge to make cheap and easy-to-operate technology lead to a combination of biological and phyto-treatment processes that designed and applied for this wastewater to meet the East Java Government’s effluent standard. The wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) used in this research consisted of control box, grease trap, sedimentation tank, anaerobic baffled reactor (ABR), anaerobic bio filter (ABF) and constructed wetland (CW). This WWTP could reduce up to 99.71% of COD, 99.76% of BOD, 98.9% of nitrogen content, 99.75% of oil and grease in wastewater.