The effectiveness of garbage enzyme to treat water contaminated with hydrocarbons

Abstract

Oil spill has created a lot of environmental related problems, especially to the marine wild lives. So, a good and easy method to clean up oil spill has to be developed too apart from preventing the occurrence of oil spill. Among the methods, the chemical dispersants face the greatest controversy. They could disperse the oil spill in a short time but they would increase the toxicity in the aquatic environment. Garbage enzyme (GE) is commonly used in household as a cleaning liquid to remove oil and grease in the kitchen. So it is believed to have the ability to disperse oil spill as it can breakdown the oil particles. This study is to test on the effectiveness of GE as oil dispersant. The experiment was carried out based on Baffled Flask Test (BFT) which is developed by US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine the dispersant effectiveness. Dispersant-to-oil ratio (DOR) of l: 10 of GE is the optimum DOR to treat water contaminated by Malaysia Tapis crude oil with GE 30, GE 60 and GE 90 performed the highest effectiveness DOR of 83.4% (±9.8), 40.5% (±4.6) and 31.1 % (±2.3) respectively. The result showed that the effectiveness of GE decreases with regards to its fermentation period. However, this result may be the influence of temperature as low temperature usually decreases the dispersability of oil or it may be the ability of GE to transform oils and greases into non-oils-and-greases. The ANOVA analysis shows that the effectiveness for both of the independent variables, DOR and fermentation period have significant differences, which is p=0.00<0.05 for both and there is significant interaction between the independent variables (DOR *Month) with F(l 8, 90) = 12.270, p=0.00<0.05 . DOR of 1: 10 is the most effective for the DOR variables and GE A is the most effective for fermentation period variables according to Turkey Test. As a co°:clusion, it is believed that GE certainly has some effect on dispersing the oil. However, further studies have to be done on various variables such as crude oil type, salinity, temperature, etc as well as the toxicity test and bioremediation agent test before we can firmly conclude that GE can be used as commercial oil dispersant that would not bring harm to environment.