| Summary: | The major pollutants from a natural rubber processing factory have high organic content and emit an offensive smell due to the biodegradation of the organic matter. In latex concentrate factories, the main sources of effluent are the skim latex serum and washings from all process equipment. This paper presents an application of membrane technology that involves gas sparging for the treatment of skim latex serum. A semi-pilot-scale system using a PVDF vertical tubular membrane (MWCO 100,000) was installed as the experimental setup. Nitrogen gas was bubbled vertically upwards at flowrates ranging from 300 to 500 ml/min. Results obtained thus far show that gas sparging has increased the permeate flux between 1.37 and 146.34 compared to non-gas sparged conditions. In terms of permeate quality, the reductions achieved for suspended solids, total solids, COD, BOD, total nitrogen and ammoniacal nitrogen were 83, 95, 67, 77, 51, 74, respectively, for the gas-sparged condition. Under non gas-sparging conditions, reductions achieved for suspended solids, total solids, COD, BOD, total nitrogen and ammoniacal nitrogen were 92, 96, 67, 72, 60, 75, respectively.
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