Abstract—Toxicity reduction is a main criterion in
prioritizing industrial wastewater treatment objectives. This
paper utilized a comprehensive survey of 41 industrial facilities
to characterize their wastewater quality parameters and to
assess their wastewater toxicity. The 41 factories were grouped
under eleven industrial categories. Microtox relative toxicity
test results indicated that industrial wastewater in Kuwait are
mostly very toxic to toxic with the exception of farms
wastewater which was found to be slightly toxic. The highest
ranking toxic wastewaters where found to be metal forming,
printing, dairy, slaughterhouses, petrochemical, poultry, food,
paper and packaging, beverage, and construction materials
industries in order. Among the contributing factors to the
toxicity of industrial wastewater are temperature, pH, metals,
COD, TOC, NH3, TPH, phenol, and BTEX.
Index Terms—Industrial wastewater, Microtox, pollution,
toxicity.
Mohd Elmuntasir Ahmed, Adel Al-Haddad, and Suad Al-Dufaileej are
with Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, Kuwait City, Kuwait (e-mail:
miahmed@kisr.edu.kw, ahadad@kisr.edu.kw, sleej@kisr.edu.kw).
Cite: Mohd Elmuntasir Ahmed, Adel Al-Haddad, and Suad Al-Dufaileej, "Characterization and Profiling of Industrial Wastewater Toxicity in Kuwait," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 35-41, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).