Poultry slaughterhouse wastewater, which represents one of the most important pollutants in Turkey, is generally treated with conventional biological processes in Turkey and around the world. In this study, poultry slaughterhouse wastewater was treated using laboratory-scale membrane processes, which were substituted for conventional processes. The performances of the membrane processes were investigated in terms of chemical oxygen demand (COD), conductivity, and membrane fluxes. Economic analyses were conducted for several membrane system alternatives. In addition, the alternatives were compared with each other and with conventional economic analysis of the data obtained in this study and data from several previous studies. The membranes used for the membrane processes were AG for reverse osmosis (RO), DK for nanofiltration (NF), and ER for ultrafiltration (UF). The highest COD removal efficiencies were 90% for NF and 97.4% for RO, and the conductivities decreased by 51.7% for NF and 96.6% for RO. When the (UF) was not used, the long-term membrane fluxes of the RO and (NF) sharply decreased, which increased the operation costs of these processes. Therefore, RO and NF without pre-treatment and with UF were not effective for this wastewater. According to the economic analysis results, the operational costs of the RO and NF after UF, the UF alone, and the conventional treatment process were 0.66, 0.70, 0.79, and 1.66 $/m³, respectively. Because the operational cost of the conventional treatment process was 2.5 times greater than RO after pre-treatment with UF, it was deduced that this membrane process combination was a suitable treatment alternative for treating poultry slaughterhouse wastewater.

The current study simultaneously examined the treatability of wastewater by electrodialysis unit and recovery of ions removed as acidic/alkaline solutions. With a bipolar membrane electrodialysis process, the removed ions are stored separately in anolyte/catholyte solutions, and then turned into mixed acids and bases. After the treatment of the leachate using the BMED process, the molar concentration of H⁺ ions in the acidic solution and the OH⁻ ions in the alkaline solution reached up to 0.095 and 0.048 M (conditions: 1 L wastewater and 1 L anolyte/catholyte solutions), respectively. When the ratio of wastewater to initial volume of anolyte and catholyte was ¼ (1 L wastewater and 0.25 L anolyte or catholyte solutions) at the end of a 360-min treatment period, 3.8- (from 0.01995 to 0.07586 M for [H⁺]) and 3.98- (from 0.02344 to 0.09333 M for [OH⁻]) times more intense acid and base concentrations were determined, respectively. This demonstrates that the process can be considered as a cleaner technology for the treatability of wastewater by obtaining more concentrated acid and base as recovered material and fewer byproducts.