Manufacturers in the textile and tannery sectors face some of the toughest wastewater treatment challenges: intense color loads, variable flows, high salinity, fats and fibers, and increasing pressure to meet ever‑stricter discharge standards. Our solutions are designed with these realities in mind. External MBR improves overall plant robustness, while tubular UF delivers proven efficiency in removing dyes, pigments, and complex colloidal contaminants. Both technologies offer durability, minimal maintenance needs, and stable operation, even in harsh industrial environments.
The textile and tannery industries are among the largest contributors to industrial water pollution worldwide, particularly in regions like India and China, where these sectors play a major role in economic growth. High production volumes, complex chemical formulations, and intense coloration make their wastewater especially challenging, placing significant pressure on local water resources and treatment infrastructure.
Textile industry is an exceptionally water‑intensive sector, consuming between 80 and 300 liters of water for every kilogram of fabric produced. On average, approximately 75% of this water is subsequently discharged as wastewater, illustrating the enormous volumes released globally by textile manufacturing facilities. The resulting effluent is highly complex due to the extensive use of chemical additives, dyes, detergents, and finishing agents throughout the production process. Consequently, textile wastewater typically contains a diverse mixture of pollutants, including high color loads, toxic compounds, and persistent organic substances, all of which pose significant challenges for conventional treatment methods.
Tanneries convert raw hides and skins into finished leather used in a wide range of consumer products. Although the sector is less water‑intensive than textile manufacturing, it still requires substantial water volumes, typically between 12 and 37 liters per kilogram of hide. In addition, tannery effluent is even more complex than textile wastewater: the tanning process releases toxic and persistent substances, such as chromium, alongside high concentrations of organic pollutants, averaging about 19 kilograms of organic carbon per ton of raw hide. Due to the considerable environmental impact associated with these operations, increasingly stringent regulations are being enforced worldwide.
Textile wastewater treatment faces significant challenges due to the highly complex and variable composition of the effluent, which contains diverse contaminants such as synthetic dyes, surfactants, salts, and auxiliary chemicals that are often resistant to biodegradation and difficult to remove using conventional treatment methods. Many dyes are structurally persistent and produce intense color even at low concentrations, creating both aesthetic and ecological problems while limiting the effectiveness of biological treatments; in addition, high salinity and elevated COD further inhibit microbial processes in conventional activated sludge systems.
Tannery wastewater is generated throughout the beam‑house, tanning, post‑tanning, and finishing operations, each contributing distinct pollutants. Beam‑house processes (soaking, liming–unhairing, degreasing, deliming, and bating) produce the largest volumes of effluent and release substantial biodegradable material, including proteins and grease, along with surfactants, bating agents, biocides, hairs, and fibers. During subsequent tanning and finishing stages, additional contaminants enter the wastewater, including vegetable or synthetic tanning agents, phthalate‑based masking agents, fat liquors, dyes, and other chemical additives. As a result, tannery wastewater is highly complex, often toxic, and challenging to treat, characterized by elevated levels of suspended solids, organic matter, nitrogen compounds, sulphates, chromium, and salts.
Tubular membrane solutions have emerged as an effective and adaptable technology for addressing the unique challenges of wastewater treatment in both textile and tannery industries. Tubular MBRs are specifically designed to handle the complex, variable effluent compositions and high pollutant loads typical of these sectors. They provide robust filtration and biological treatment, efficiently removing persistent dyes, pigments, and difficult-to-biodegrade substances, while maintaining operational stability even during toxic shock events. Their modular design allows seamless integration with pre- and post-treatment processes, including RO, to achieve stringent discharge standards and support water reuse initiatives, making them a cost-competitive and sustainable solution for industrial water management.
On the other hand, tubular UF can be applied as a direct filtration process to separate pigments or dyes from textile wastewater. Since various compounds are used in dyeing processes, UF membranes are particularly effective for sub‑micron pigment particles, achieving their complete removal. By applying UF directly to pigment‑rich dyeing streams before they mix with other wastewater, industries can simplify treatment, reduce overall pollutant load, and even recover concentrated pigment rejects for potential reuse, improving both resource efficiency and circularity in textile operations
Berghof tubular MBR, combined with appropriate pre‑ and post‑treatment steps, offers a robust, reliable, and highly efficient solution for both textile and tannery wastewater treatment, with numerous proven installations worldwide. The system can be tailored to meet each project’s specific requirements, easily integrating with complementary processes to achieve the desired effluent quality at the highest level of cost‑competitiveness.
In textile applications, removing dyes is often the most critical challenge. Compared with conventional activated sludge systems, tubular MBR technology has demonstrated significantly higher efficiency in removing soluble dyes. In addition, the excellent permeate quality produced by the MBR allows it to be fed directly to RO for further removal of color and salts.
For tannery wastewater, tubular MBR units are typically installed downstream of physicochemical pretreatment stages designed for metal removal, such as chromium. When ZLD or internal water reuse is required, an RO system can be added after the MBR to remove salts and polish the permeate, enabling high‑quality water recycling within the tannery process.
High quality effluent
MBRs consistently deliver high‑quality effluent in textile & tannery wastewater treatment. Compared with conventional biological systems, MBRs produce water that is free of suspended solids and turbidity, and shows significantly lower COD, BOD, and color levels.
Enhanced biological treatment
Because textile production involves a wide variety of dyes — many of them synthetic, chemically stable, and poorly biodegradable — achieving effective color removal is often difficult. Nevertheless, operational experience shows that MBRs deliver significantly better dye reduction (frequently > 30 %), driven by their long sludge retention times and the development of specialized microbial communities capable of degrading refractory dye compounds.
RO integration
When further color and TDS reduction is required for discharge or reuse, MBRs offer a major advantage: they generate an effluent with SDI < 3, making it suitable for direct feeding into NF or RO units within reuse or ZLD strategies.
Additionally, according to our OEM partners, tubular MBR technology offers a compact footprint, high operational flexibility, adaptability to varying load conditions, and straightforward maintenance.
MBR technology is widely used for the treatment of textile and tannery wastewater, typically following a series of essential pre‑treatment steps.
For tannery effluents in particular, pre‑treatment commonly includes oil and grease separation, as well as chemical precipitation for the removal of metals (e.g., chromium). In addition, fine screening is necessary to retain hairs, fibers, and other coarse materials that could impact downstream processes.
Once treated through the MBR, the effluent reliably meets the quality requirements for discharge into either sewer networks or receiving water bodies. It can also be reused, both directly for certain applications or, when additional removal of dissolved solids is required, through a final polishing step with reverse osmosis.
The presence of dyes and pigments represents one of the main challenges in textile wastewater treatment. Ultrafiltration effectively addresses this issue by reliably retaining insoluble pigment fractions, enabling consistent effluent quality even under highly variable operating conditions.
The textile industry relies on a wide range of dyes and pigments to achieve the desired coloration of fabrics. While dyes are soluble in water, pigments are not: an essential distinction that makes tubular UF particularly effective for pigment‑laden wastewater streams. By applying tubular UF membranes directly to these specific streams before they mix with the rest of the plant’s wastewater, treatment processes can be significantly simplified. Tubular membranes are uniquely suited to this task because their robust design and larger channel diameters can handle high suspended‑solids loads without clogging.
A clear example is the treatment of indigo blue dye effluent in denim production. Berghof tubular UF membranes have demonstrated the ability to remove more than 90% of color and over 99% of turbidity in a single direct‑filtration step. The crossflow operating mode minimizes fouling, ensuring stable performance, high fluxes, and very low reject volumes. The resulting permeate is clear, free of pigments and turbidity, and suitable for downstream reuse or discharge. Meanwhile, the concentrated reject stream rich in valuable pigment particles can even be recycled back into the dyeing process, supporting resource efficiency and reducing overall chemical consumption.
The dyeing processes in the textile industry generate distinct wastewater streams that contain substantial amounts of residual dyes. After fine screening removes loose fibers, this stream is fed directly into tubular UF membranes. The UF system produces a reject stream with a high dye concentration, which can be recovered and reused in the dyeing process, reducing overall chemical consumption. The permeate, free of dyes, suspended solids, and turbidity, can be blended with other wastewater streams in the facility and sent to the on‑site treatment plant. Alternatively, if the permeate quality meets local regulatory standards, it may be discharged directly to the public sewer.
This case study shows how an MBR system efficiently treats tannery effluent, reduces fouling, and enables high water reuse in leather manufacturing processes.
