Abstract
The general hospital in Tuz town in Iraq suffers from the absence of a wastewater treatment plant, in which the disposals of the hospital are discharged directly into the sewerage system. The aim of this study is to use simple and basic methods for treating wastewater from the general hospital in Tuz Town using bentonite clay and alum with different dosages by methods of coagulation, flocculation, and sedimentation using Jar test, to measure the general characteristics of wastewater such as chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5), potential of hydrogen (PH), electrical conductivity (EC), nitrates (NO3), phosphates (PO4), hardness, calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), turbidity, chlorides (Cl), and sulfates (SO4). The results showed that bentonite clay was more effective than alum in removing pollutants from wastewater. The removal efficient of COD and BOD5 was 65% and 57%, respectively, at the optimum dosage of bentonite clay, whereas the efficient removal of COD and BOD5 using alum was 60% and 48%, respectively. Higher efficiency removal of turbidity was 75% for bentonite and 65% for alum; the higher value of efficiency removal was 68% for NO3 and 60% for PO4 while the higher efficiency using the treatment with alum was 58% for NO3 and 49% for PO4. The changing in the value of pH was decreased with increasing the dosages of alum, for the first dosage 20 mg/l, the value of PH was 7.1 then it was decreased to reach 6.2 at 120 mg/l, whereas bentonite shows increasing in value of PH to reach 7.6 at dosage of 120 mg/l.