Fish factory effluent

In fish processing plants a large quantity of water is used as cleaning and transport medium. The water becomes polluted with fats, proteins, bones and 

Filtrating with 0.2 pm HIC ceramic membranes a COD reduction of over 60% was reached, at a content of suspended solids in the permeate of less than 10 ppm. Permeate flux was at a level of 150 1/m h at a process temperature of 25°C. Comparable results were found by Quemeneur and Jaouen [32]. 

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Vega, M.M., A. Castano, T. Blazquez and J.V. Tarazona. Assessing organic toxic pollutants in fish-canning factory effluents using cultured fish cells. Ecotoxicology 3 79—88, 1994. 

The greatest concentration of mirex in the environment was found in Lake Ontario, Canada, where several factories dumped effluent containing mirex. Almost all of the mirex in North America was produced by the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Company of Niagara Falls, New York. A Canadian study found that although effluent runoff was isolated to Lake Ontario, mirex was found in sediment and fish samples from each of the Great Lakes 48a,48b This raises the question of how mirex is being transported upstream from Lake Ontario.54-56... 

How mercury from a Japanese factory contaminated fish in Minamata Bay. The effluent, containing inorganic mercury and discharged into the bay from the factory, was not dispersed in the water, but formed sediment at the bottom where micro-organisms converted the mercury into the more toxic methyl-mercury. The methylmercury accumulated in fish and was consumed by people eating the fish. 

Dr Hosokawa, director of the Minamata City hospital was conducting his own experiments based on the theory from the university He fed cats waste effluent from the factory that was producing acetaldehyde and was able to produce similar symptoms in them, and he detected other changes by pathological examination at autopsy The company that owned the factory, the Chisso Minamata Chemical Company, was aware of his work and by 1959 knew that it was likely that Minamata disease was caused by the effluent from their factory In i960 methyl mercury was detected in seafood and in 1961 it was detected in sediments derived from the factory. In 1966 the factory installed a water circulation system which removed the mercury pollution. The factory eventually stopped the process in 1968 and in the same year the Japanese government announced its opinion that the disease was due to consumption of methyl mercury in contaminated fish and seafood. 

Pollution caused by effluents from chemical works is not a new problem, and the discharges emanating from some of the earlier chemical factories (for example the Leblanc alkali works) were quite horrendous by modem standards. One example of a twentieth century pollution problem is provided by Minamata disease. This was caused by the discharge of mercury, used as a catalyst in a plastics factory, into Minamata Bay in Japan. Some of those who ate fish caught in the bay suffered damage to the nervous system, and some children bom to mothers who had eaten the fish had serious birth defects. Although mercury was identified as the cause of the problem in 1953, it was not understood how such low concentrations of the metal could cause such serious problems. It was only in 1969 that it was realised that the real culprit was dimethylmercury, which had been formed from metallic mercury by bacteria in the mud at the bottom of the bay. 

The first incident in the modern era to bring mercury and its hazards to the public eye occurred at Minamata Bay, Japan, in 1953. Here many fishermen and their families were stricken with mercury poisoning when they ate fish and shellfish that contained high amounts of mercury, ultimately traced to the effluent of a nearby poly(vinylchloride) factory. Mercury in fish, particularly those such as tuna, marlin, and swordfish at the top of aquatic food chains, soon became a newsworthy... 

The Bavarian Minister of State informed the German Consul in Rotterdam that BASF had not transported any barrels to the sea since 1868 but had emptied the (diluted) arsenic acids into the Rhine. To allay the fears of the Dutch he referred to a factory inspection in which the inspector observed that a number of small fish were moving to and fro in a waste sewer. He also enclosed a report made for the local government in Trier which certified for the company that damage to the fish population through introduction of effluents containing arsenic from this factory into the Rhine does not come into question . ... 

BA Koblenz, R 86/2515. Mutterstadt, 5 October 1868. The underlining of the words this factory , which appears in the original, indicates that the inspector did, indeed, determine damage to the fish population, but could not prove that it came from BASF effluents containing arsenic. 

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