Monitoring microbial quality of commercial dairy products in West Azerbaijan province, northwest of Iran

Technical and financial feasibility of a chemicals recovery and energy and water production from a dairy wastewater treatment plant

Due to the high volume of wastewater produced from dairy factories, it is necessary to integrate a water recovery process with the treatment plant. Today, bipolar membrane electrodialysis units (BMEUs) are increasingly developed for wastewater treatment and reutilizing. This article aims to develop and evaluate (technical and cost analyses) a combined BMEU/batch reverse osmosis unit (BROU) process for the recovery of chemicals and water from the dairy wastewater plant. The combined BROU/BMEU process is able to simultaneously produce water and strong base-acid, and reduce power consumption due to the injection of concentrated feed flow into the BMEU. A comprehensive comparative analysis on the performances of two combined and stand-alone BMEU configurations are developed. The proposed combined technology for dairy factory wastewater treatment is designed on a new structure and configuration that can address superior cost analysis compared to similar technologies. Further, the optimal values of permeate flux and current density as two vital and influencing parameters on the performance of the studied dairy wastewater treatment process were calculated and discussed. From the outcomes, the total cost of production in the combined configuration has been reduced by approximately 26% compared to the stand-alone configuration. Increasing the feed concentration rate using the batch reverse osmosis process for the dairy wastewater treatment process can be an ideal solution from an economic point of view. Moreover, point (current density, feed concentration rate, total unit cost) = 328.9 , 7 , 14.37 can be considered as an optimal point for the economic performance of the studied wastewater treatment process.

Microbiological quality of pasteurized milk on expiration date in Tehran, Iran

The aim of this study was to determine the microbiological quality of pasteurized milk on expiration date in Tehran. Two hundred fifty-four samples collected using a simple randomized sampling method from March 2014 to January 2015 were tested for total microbial count, coliform count, and Escherichia coli contamination according to Iran's National Standards methods. Total microbial count, coliform count, and E. coli contamination exceeded the standard limits in 61.1% [>7.5 × 10(4) (4.88 log) cfu/mL], 24.4% [>10 (1 log) cfu/mL], and 8.7% of the samples, respectively. The mean total microbial count [7.1 × 10(7) (7.85 log) cfu/mL] was above the standard limit. Only 36.6% of the studied samples were in accordance with Iran's National Standard limits. Based on our results, it is necessary to improve the microbial quality of pasteurized milk in Iran.