Sustainable treatment of saline dye wastewater and resource recovery with flux-recoverable hollow fiber of antifouling 'water channel'.

Synthetic dye is one of the major pollutants in saline wastewater. This demands emerging approaches for reuse of wastewater and inclusive management of water systems towards sustainability of water and environmentally beneficial ecosystem. We report here a fabrication process scalable for large-scale manufacturing of antifouling hollow fiber membrane with mean pore size of 1 nm, that can selectively allow permeation of water and NaCl (>95 %) from the salty (NaCl) dye wastewater and concentrate Reactive Black-5 dye (>99 %). The membrane exhibited antifouling property as the membrane flux recovered to almost its initial flux (~97 %) with intermittent washing with water and the flux was almost constant over a long period of separation experiment using dye wastewater feed. Thus, this hollow fiber membrane has potential for recovery/reuse of valuable dyes/NaCl as well as water reclamation from the wastewater. [Display omitted] • Spinning with surface coating process to make antifouling hollow fiber membrane • Surface reaction aided the formation of 'water channel' nanopores. • Surface COOH and OH groups imparted membrane hydrophilicity. • High endurance with 97 % flux-recovery-ratio in dye wastewater treatment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]