Impact of total dissolved solids on the environment and recent strategies for the complex industrial effluents treatment.

Authors

Abhay Vaidya, Tarini Prasad Sahoo, Nirpendra Semwal, Hitesh T Saravaia

Published in

Journal of environmental management. Volume 414. Pages 130467. Jul 14, 2026. Epub Jul 14, 2026.

Abstract

High-TDS wastewater discharged from various industries, including textile, dye & dye intermediate, pharmaceuticals, pulp and paper, tannery, dairy, food, brewery etc., pose a serious impact on environment. Generally, TDS effluents shows concentration considerably higher than their general regulatory discharge limits. Release of high TDS effluent with other contaminants harms aquatic life and makes it difficult to use such aquatic systems for human and animal consumption. A partial reduction of TDS can be achieved in the range of 15-35% by physicochemical treatments like coagulation-flocculation, chemical precipitation and adsorption, efficient for removing suspended and colloidal particles. Biological treatment process removes 70-95% of Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) and other organic pollutants from such wastewater but only less than 10% of dissolved solids can be removed from this process. While ion exchange, NF, RO, and ED can effectively remove TDS with an efficiency ranging from 85% to 98%, however, all these technologies have major disadvantage of high maintenance cost, membrane fouling, high energy consumption and brine disposal problems. Multi effect evaporator (MEE) and Multi vapor Recompression (MVR) offer almost complete removal of TDS and are being considered widely in the ZLD systems. Field-scale integrated membrane-thermal systems have also been applied by various Indian industries to lower influent TDS over 15,000 mg/L to <500 mg/L. The review highlights the impact of TDS on the environment and sustainable management of high-TDS industrial wastewater with special focus on integrated treatment strategies of pretreatment technique with membrane desalination, thermal concentration, and brine-management approaches to minimize environmental impacts and support near-zero liquid discharge (ZLD) objectives under diverse industrial operating conditions.

PMID:
42447557
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 15 Jul 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.