What can we do for Effluent waste collected from ceramic industry

Ceramics industry uses a large quantities of water for various activities like raw materials mixing and grinding, slip production, washing, etc.

After processes like the above, a large quantity of water is collected as waste water which should be treated before reuse of released to the environment.

Therefore, a ceramic factory is always equipped with an Effluent Treatment Plant which process the waste water and produce clean water. The process also create a solid sludge extracted from the waste water. After a sedimentation and a filter pressing process, the sediments are collected as lumps, which some may use the name "ETP Cake".

The ETP sludge consists of a mix of raw materials used in the process like, clay, feldspar, silica, calcite, fits, color stains, etc.

There should be a proper waste management method to the above waste as some of the contents are some kind of hazardous to the environment. 

In most cases, the collected ETP cake is added back to the body in small quantities. But is some cases, this cannot be done as per the purity levels which should be maintained in the body formulations and firing variations/abnormalities due to mixture of raw materials. (eg: low melting raw materials mixed in the sludge which may create issues when firing to higher temperatures in a separate process)

Other than that, there are some occasions where the sludge from one ceramic process used as a raw materials for some other ceramic related production process. (eg: sludge from ceramic tiles/tableware manufacturing can be used for roof tiles manufacturing as a partial raw material as the purity required by the roof tiles are less and the firing conditions are lower.)

Though the best solution is to reduce the waste as much as possible, the waste water generation cannot be eliminated in some cases in the industry. So, more productive and reliable solutions should be facilitated.

People are looking in to other possibilities which the waste can be reduced and how the waste can be reused / recycled.