[curiouscat]

We have some process wash water that has dissolved organic matter giving it a Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) of ~20,000 ppm. We do have an Effluent Treatment Plant downstream but before we pass our effluent to it we'd prefer to lower our COD if at all possible by some initial treatment.

Ideas? I've tried heating it & also bubbling N2 without much success. Any other options? An acid / base wash? H2O2?

The primary dissolved organics are some combination of the following.

[discodermolide]

You could, if you are going to do an acid/base wash, add toluene and extract. Or just extract with toluene, perhaps you can uses the extracted material?

[curiouscat]

You could, if you are going to do an acid/base wash, add toluene and extract. Or just extract with toluene, perhaps you can uses the extracted material?

Will try! Reusing the extracted material would be icing on the cake.

[curiouscat]

Or just extract with toluene, perhaps you can uses the extracted material?

An update: Weirdly the toluene extraction doesn't seem to help much. Very counter-intuitive.

Reduced the COD by only ~2000 units. That's only about 10%.

Any other ideas?

[curiouscat]

What does seem to work is HCl. It reduces the COD by almost half. A tiny dose of 30% HCl seems to precipitate out a lot of the COD.

In  case it helps anyone...