Treatment of rose processing wastewater by Chlorella Sp. and evaluation of effluent as biofertilizer and irrigation water

The majority of the essential oil produced in Turkey constitutes the rose oil obtained from "Rosa damascena". In the rose oil plants, the process wastewater is discharged directly into the nature or collected in the accumulation pounds without any treatment. This creates adverse environmental conditions. In this study, treatment of rose processing wastewater by chlorella sp in open and closed microalgae cultivation systems and evaluation of process performance in terms of treatment effectiveness, algal biomass production, quality of irrigation water, biofertilizer, and production energies were determined. In this thesis, the optimum dosage of the rose processing wastewater for biological treatment was determined as the nutrient for Chlorella sp. microalgae strain indoor condition. Then, the determined dose was applied to the tubular photobioreactor (T-FBR) and race-way (RW) cultivation systems operated in greenhouse conditions (outdoor) to determine the wastewater treatment and biofertilizer and irrigation water potentials in open and closed systems. Findings for the indoor conditions showed that G4, 50 % of which the cultivation media comes from rose processing wastewater, was determined as the optimum dose as the nutrient for Chlorella sp. for microalgae strain. G4 dose was used as nutrient for 8 days in open and closed systems. At the end of the experiment conducted in the outdoor condition, 61.76 % COD removal was provided in the RW and 78.75 % BOD5 removal was achieved for the same system. In the T-FBR, 53.03 % COD removal was achieved and 60 % removal was obtained for BOD5. A reduction of 7.8% in the T-FBR system was achieved for NO3. For NO3-N, 17.1% reduction in RW system and 8.7% reduction in T-FBR system was maintained. The NH4-N removal was 67% in the RW system and 34.9% in the T-FBR system. It was concluded that the best result was obtained from RW cultivation system in terms of COD and BOD5 removal. At the same time, the irrigation water obtained from this system was found to be in the C3-S1 class in terms of irrigation water. When evaluated in terms of biofertilizer potentials, T-FBR system gave the best result. High value added biofertilizer and irrigation water have been obtained from the rose processing wastewater after the treatment, which is the output of the growing rose sector, which is the most important input to the economy of the Lakes Region. In conclusion, RW is preferred cultivation system in terms of COD, BOD5, NO3, NO3-N and NH4-N, while the T-FBR system was determined to be better than RW system in terms of biofertizer potential.