Rural Groundwater Treatment using Agricultural Waste Material

Groundwater plays a major source of water for agriculture as well as for domestic purpose in rural areas. Rapid industrialization and unplanned discharge of effluents made the natural resource groundwater as unsafe. One of the affected area is Ambur sub basin, a part of Palar river basin, Tamil Nadu, India, severely contaminated by uncontrolled disposal of treated and untreated tannery effluents. The problem may be universal and it should be tackled by no doubt no to disposal of liquid waste into land and surface water. But still the groundwater is under polluted condition by the past actions and there is no other water source for agriculture, groundwater need to be treated. There should be the affordable treatment methods for rural areas to minimize the treatment cost. The readily available agricultural waste material such as sugarcane bagasse may be utilized as filter media to treat the groundwater. In this study, different forms of sugarcane bagasse were used as filter media and developed the filters for treating the groundwater contaminated by total dissolved solids (TDS). The results revealed the reduction of TDS by adsorption. Further study will lead to the development of water treatment kit using the above said materials for rural areas.