Membrane technology for the recovery of detergent compounds: A review

The food and beverage industry is a great detergent consumer, due to the extreme cleanliness demanded by this kind of industrial activity. Surfactants play an important role in detergent formulations and for this reason a significant part of this review is devoted to their recovery. Membrane technology has been selected as the most promising method for recovering these cleaning agents and, accordingly, the application of membranes for the recovery and reuse of waste cleaning solutions constitutes another important part of this review. Finally, several studies on the application of membrane technologies for the separation of surfactant compounds are also described. (C) 2012 The Korean Society of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.