Membrane Bioreactors treating tannery wastewaters: Limits and potentials for an optimized full-scale application

This chapter contains a review of Membrane Bio Reactor application to tannery wastewater treatment based on the scientific literature and a lot of experimental and practical experiences of the authors. To introduce the topic, a preliminary overview of the tannery wastewater characterization and of the common applied wastewater treatment trains are reported. Due to their high consumption within the tanning process, water and chemical recovery constitute the main force for the increasing attention by industry and researchers to the application of MBR systems for tannery wastewater treatment. The results of scientific publications are reported, and the advantages and the drawbacks related to MBR adoption are underlined and discussed. MBR application, mostly in complex systems aimed to maximize water recovery, are suggested and the importance of biological and chemical-physical processes modeling when treating such industrial wastewater in MBR systems is highlighted referring to experimental evidences.