Resumen
Palm oil mill effluent (POME) characterized with high total suspended solids (TSS) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) can pollute the waterways if not treated properly. The aim of this work is to study the alternative flocculant to replace commercial flocculant. Natural flocculant derived from fruit waste, banana peel (BP) was investigated together with coagulant, fenugreek seeds to evaluate their performance. Experimental study was carried out using jar test to study the effects of two variables, settling time and BP dosage on responses, namely TSS and COD removal efficiencies. Optimization study using response surface methodology (RSM) based on box-beckhen design (BBD) was carried out. The results showed that both quadratic models were fit with R2 more than 0.95, indicating the high accuracy of both models. The optimum conditions predicted by the software were 69 minutes settling time and 22.44g/l BP dosage, with TSS and COD removal efficiencies of 73.9% and 74.9%. The results were then validated by conducting experiment at predicted optimum conditions. It showed both errors of less than 5%, thus made the results reliable. Compared to commercial flocculant, banana peel with fenugreek seeds showed better removal efficiencies than commercial flocculant, where removal efficiencies only up to 69.4% and 57.2%. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) were used to analyse the mechanism of BP in details. Banana peel certainly can be an alternative potential bioflocculant due to its various functional groups, low cost, easily available locally and can significantly contribute to the waste reduction.