Original Articles
Anusha S. and Pratheeba Paul
Abstract
Land pollution has become a serious problem in the present scenario and resolving this issue is yet another challenging task. Solid wastes contribute to serious threats on environmental hazards and it has become the need of the hour to develop sustainable methods in handling them by enhancing cleaner technologies in recycling and thereby creating safe environment adding organic fertility to soil. Dairy industry is an important sector in both the developed and developing nations and the pollutants from these consists of organic compounds with enormous amounts of suspended solids, biochemical oxygen demand and chemical oxygen demand along with nitrate compounds. The wastewater from dairy industries when dumped or land filled has various disadvantages of being expensive occupying more open space resulting in polluting the ground water and soil resources. In the present work, the dairy sludge from AAVIN industry, Chennai was stabilized by the technique of vermiconversion. Initially dairy sludge and cow dung of varying proportions of 1:2 and 2:2 were mixed and earthworms of two different species called Eisenia foetida and Eudrilus Eugenia were added to the contents for about 55 days to create vermicomposting. The vermicomposted sludge exhibited very good results in comparison to normal sludge and were added to the radish plants where they yielded good growth results.