OIL RECOVERY AND HEAVY METALS REMOVAL FROM PALM OIL MILL EFFLUENT BY USING CEIBA PENTANDRA (L.) AS A NATURAL SORBENT

Nowadays, the Malaysian palm oil industry is growing rapidly and becomes a very important
agriculture-based industry, where the country is the world's leading producer and exporter of
palm oil. However wet process of palm oil milling basically consumes a large amount process of
water. It is estimated that for 1 tonne of crude palm oil produced, 5-7.5 tones of water will be
used, and more than 50% of the water will end up as palm oil mill effluent (PO ME). The raw
POME is a colloidal about 95% of water, 0.7% of oil and 5% of total solids [3] . If the effluent is
discharged untreated, it can certainly cause considerable environmental problems due to its high
biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, oil and grease, and total solids as well as
suspended solids [3].

Palm oil industries in Malaysia has grown to become an important agriculture based industry and
it is accounted for about 52% of the world palm oil output, which generated about RM 13
billions export earning for the country. By increasing the number of production of palm oil in the
region, the disposal of the processes waste will raise and become a main problem in the future if
it is not being treated properly starts from now. Palm oil mill waste or also known as POME is
very polluting because it has high organic content. Malaysian Department of Environment
(DOE) only allows the content of oil and grease about 50mg/l in POME but currently, most of
POME has about 4000mg/l which is relatively high compared to DOE's requirement [1]. So, the
main objective of this project is to recover the oil/metal from palm oil mill effluent (POME)
waste by using natural sorbent. The development of natural absorbent as the main sorbent for the
oil recovery process will be focused in this project. This is because natural source is cheap and
available, as there would be no problem to increase its consumption.