Textile Wastewater Treated by Constructed Wetlands – A Critical Review

Textile industries are among the most environmentally unsustainable businesses, releasing large amounts of effluent that endangers ecosystem health. Constructed wetlands (CWs) are low-cost eco-technical treatments for industrial wastewater control. The CWs are self-contained remediation systems that do not require external energy and have basic mechanisms for pollutant removal, such as biological, chemical, and physical processes. For more than sixty years, constructed wetlands have been utilized to clean wastewater. Most applications have been developed to treat municipal or household wastewater, although CWs are now successfully used to treat a wide range of wastewater types. Constructed wetlands were also employed to treat textile industry effluents in the 1990s. The survey indicated that textile manufacturing wastewaters were treated using subsurface and surface-flow wetlands. Both horizontal and vertical flow systems have been designed within subsurface flow-created wetlands. In addition, many hybrid-built wetlands have recently been documented in the literature for textile industrial wastewater treatment. According to the survey, textile industrial wastewater is treated in constructed wetlands on all continents, and this research includes the data from 65 constructed wetlands in 21 nations worldwide. This paper examined the latest improvements and discoveries in CWs and the many types of CWs used for textile wastewater treatment. The paper also demonstrated state-of-the-art integrated technologies for improving the performance and sustainability of CWs, such as CW-MFC systems.