Socio-Economic Impact Assessment of Textile Wastes in Arba Minch and Hawassa Textile Factories

Abstract

The untreated effluents discharged by the industries leads to serious pollution of surface water, ground water, soils and ultimately affect the livelihood of the poor. With these respect assessment of socio-economic impacts of these textile industries is one of the crucial issues. Theoretical data were collected through questionnaires, interviews and observations of workers and Peoples resided near textiles. In addition to the theoretical data indicators of physicochemical pollutants such as color, temperature, conductivity, pH, TDS, TSS, BOD and COD of nearby water bodies were studied. The values of COD (mg/L) for six sample sites were 328, 264, 68, 60,190, and 160 and the value of BOD(mg/L) 120, 90.5, 24, 27, 40.8, and 27.5 respectively. Some are found to be higher than the limits set by WHO (COD 250mg/L) and (BOD 30 mg/L) for the discharged of textile effluents into river. The ratio of BOD:COD was less than 0.5 indicates that effluent contains large proportion of non-biodegradable matter. Total of workers employed in both textiles are1584 with monthly salary ranging from 500 to 6000. The worker use glove, aprons and safety shoes are about 15.9%, the rest use one of the safety materials mentioned above. The residences suffered from bad odor of the textile wastes, they have got asthma, frequent headache, sneezing, and influenza. Animals of the residences that drank waste water and ate the nearby grass become thin and got long lasting sick. It was therefore, concluded that textile effluents were highly polluted hence negatively affect the socio-economic development. Appropriate treatment of must be made to render the wastewater suitable for residences and the receiving water bodies. Key Words: Socioeconomic impact, Textile waste, socio-economic.