Harmful effects of sugarcane vinasse on water bodies: conventional remediation technologies

Abstract

The production of bioethanol generates large volumes of vinasse, a hazardous potentially wastewater. For a long time, the most common practices for management vinasse consisted of its disposal into the natural water-courses. Nevertheless, these practices caused detrimental effects on the aquatic ecosystem. Today many countries have with environmental legislations, which explicitly prohibits the vinasse disposal in environment, without prior conditioning treatment. Different treatment technologies (physicochemical and biological) aimed to reduce the vinasse toxicity are currently available. Nevertheless, biological conditioning of distillery effluent (bioprocessing) is recognized as the eco-friendliest practice. On the other hand, reuse of vinasse in fertigation practices is an alternative consolidated in many countries. In the same way, bioconversion of distillery effluents into added value products constitute an adequate strategy to improve the economics and reduce the detrimental effects of the bioethanol industry. In this chapter summarized the main harmful effects of sugarcane vinasse on water bodies. Moreover, most recent knowledge on available remediation technologies and alternatives developed for an optimal reuse of this effluent are presented.