Desalination 248 (2009) 836–842 Monitoring of the quality of winery influents/effluents and polishing of partially treated winery flows by homogeneous Fe(II) photo-oxidation Natasa Anastasiou a,b , Maria Monou a , Dionissios Mantzavinos b , Despo Kassinos a * a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Cyprus, 75 Kallipoleos, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus b Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Polytechneioupolis, GR-73100 Chania, Greece Tel: 003522892275; Fax: 0035722892295; email: dfatta@ucy.ac.cy Received 2 October 2008; accepted 12 November 2008 Abstract Winery wastewaters contain high concentrations of organic compounds including phytotoxic and recalcitrant compounds like phenols. Its treatment by conventional processes is difficult due to the variability of the character- istics of the liquid waste. The main objectives of this work were to (1) monitor onsite the quality of winery wastes prior to and following sequential physical and biological treatment and (2) assess the efficiency of coupling phys- ical and biological treatment to photo-Fenton oxidation serving as the final polishing step. A partially treated effluent with chemical oxygen demand (COD) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD 5 ) values of 1060 and 210 mg/L respectively was subject to photo-Fenton oxidation at H 2 O 2 and Fe 2+ concentrations between 34–175 and 0.5–2 mM respectively, solution pH 0 = 2.5, under continuous UV-A irradiation provided by a 125 W lamp. In general, organic matter degradation increased with increasing treatment time reaching values of COD or BOD removal as high as 80% after 4 h of reaction. Regarding the effect of initial iron and hydrogen peroxide concentrations, there appears to be an optimum dosage for both, above which treatment performance deteriorated. Hence, the combined biological + photo-Fenton oxidation resulted in 95% COD removal. Keywords: Advanced oxidation; BOD removal; COD removal; Photo-Fenton; Winery wastewaters 1. Introduction The wine industry generates large volumes of wastewaters originating from various washing steps during the crushing and pressing of grapes as well as the rinsing of fermentation tanks, bar- rels and other items of equipment. According to Vlyssides et al. [1], the total production of wastewater from a winery is about 1.2 times greater than the production of wine. Winery wastewater is characterized by high organic con- tent, seasonal production, unpleasant odours and variable composition, which is associated with the winemaking technologies employed (i.e., *Corresponding author. Presented at the Conference on Protection and Restoration of the Environment IX, Kefalonia Greece, June 30–July 3, 2008 0011-9164/09/$– See front matter © 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.desal.2008.11.006