1. Introduction
Over the last four decades, the palm oil industry has grown by
leaps and bounds to become a very important agriculture based
industry in Malaysia. Currently, Malaysia accounts for 51% of world
palm oil production and 62% of world exports (MPOC, 2009).
Concurrent to this huge amount of production, voluminous highly
polluting wastewater referred as palm oil mill effluent (POME) is
produced. Generally, 1 tonne of crude palm oil production requires
5e7.5 tonne of water; and more than 50% of the water will end up
as POME (Ahmad et al., 2003). POME has been identified to be one
of the major sources of water pollution due to its high biochemical
oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD)
concentrations. Hence, the government had enacted Environmental
Quality Acts (EQA) in 1978 and set parameter limits for the
discharge of POME into the environment as shown in Table 6.