Recently, pollution problem in coastal water has become more serious and pollution including red tide serves as a main reason for reduction of fishes resources. Particularly, nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus are the most serious pollutants. Normally, biological wastewater treatment process is used in removing such nutrients. However, it is difficult to adopt the biological wastewater treatment process to a small-scale fish processing factory in case of using seawater as wash water. Thus, removing nutrients through struvite crystallization is investigated in this study for treating shrimp processing wastewater. Experiments were conducted by varying molar ratio of Mg2+:NH4-N:PO4-P from 1:1:1 to 2:1:1. It can be concluded that optimum molar ratio is 1:1:1. Struvite crystallization process is compared with chemical coagulation process using PAC and struvite crystallization process is proven as the more effective process in removing nutrients from wastewater. In view of results obtained from these experiments, struvite crystallization process is a promising method in removing nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater; however, not so good in removing organics. Thus, struvite crystallization process is suitable as the pre-treatment process in treating shrimp processing wastewater and additional biological process is needed to remove organics.

• 정병곤(군산대학교 환경공학과) | Byung Gon JEONG (Department of Environmental Engineering, Kunsan National University, Gunsan 54150, Korea) Corresponding author