Characterisation of Oil Palm (<italic>Elaeis guineensis</italic>) Trunk Starch as Coagulant for Landfill Leachate Treatment: Fid-Bau Portal

Characterisation of Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis) Trunk Starch as Coagulant for Landfill Leachate Treatment

Mohd Yusoff, Nur Hayati / Yusoff, Mohd Suffian / Aziz, Hamidi Abdul / Ahmed, Zaber

The oil palm tree (Elaeis guineensis) produces 90% of the biomass, such as an oil palm trunk (OPT), an oil palm frond (OPF), an empty fruit bunch (EFB), and palm oil mill effluent (POME). In this study, starch is extracted from palm oil trunk waste and determined characteristics as a natural coagulant for landfill leachate treatment through the coagulation-flocculation process to evaluate the potentiality of native and crosslinking starch (C-OPTS). From the Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) the bonding structure and functional group of starch-based coagulant from oil palm trunk are obtained. The salient groups of coagulation-flocculation such as carbonyl, carboxyl, amino (amine and amide) and methoxyl groups were identified in both OPTS and C-OPTS. The molecular weight and Z-average hydrodynamic diameter of PAC were approximately 177 kDa and 0.51 μm, respectively, comparatively lower than C-OPTS (886 kDa, 1.44 μm) and OPTS (865 kDa, 1.47 μm). It was thus clear that PAC should have a greater consistency of reactivity during the coagulation-flocculation process. Therefore, although both OPTS and C-OPTS had low consistency of reactivity towards leachate pollutants, however, the usage of OPTS and C-OPTS had the potential to remove pollutants inside the leachate due to the bigger molecular weight and the presence of an effective group for the coagulation-flocculation process. A portion of starch with larger molecular weights seemed to be washed out during the crosslinking process with epichlorohydrin (ECH), which improved the uniformity. A higher uniformity eventually increases the agglomeration among the particles during coagulation-flocculation. Furthermore, ECH-crosslinking triggered the amorphous sections of the starch particle through glycidyl ether link, which mainly elaborated the amylose that restrained starch flocculation capability as it was reticulated by amylopectin with a lower detrimental effect on coagulation efficiency.