1. INTRODUCTION
India is one of the largest producers and consumers of 22
million tones of sugar per annum in the world and about
1000L of wastewater is produced for every ton of cane
crushed [1]. Because of high BOD content, sugar industry
wastewater lead to the depletion of dissolved oxygen content
in the water bodies resulting if discharged untreated, rendering
the water bodies unfit for both aquatic and human uses [2]. If
untreated wastewater is discharged on land, decaying organic
solids present in the wastewater clog the soil pores [3].
Rapid urbanization, industrialization and population growth
have led to the severe contamination of most of the fresh water
resources with untreated industrial and municipal wastes [4].
Treatment and reuse of wastewaters have become absolute
necessity to avoid pollution of fresh water bodies [5]. Hence
purification of sugar industry wastewater is a challenging task
due to the stringent discharge standards for the protection of
environment.
Sugar industry effluent is conventionally treated by adopting
various physico-chemical and biological methods. These
conventional processes suffer the disadvantage that the reagent
costs are high and the soluble COD removal is low. Moreover,
chemical treatments could induce a secondary pollution due to
the fact that chemical additives may contaminate the treated
water [6]. Coagulants in addition to increasing the amount of
sludge production increase the total solids in the effluents;
adsorption process necessitates back-washing and use of
membranes has the problem of scaling and frequent membrane