How Does Wastewater Biological Treatment Work?

 

What is Wastewater Biological Treatment?

Biological wastewater treatment is the largest biotechnological industry in the world, essential for protecting human health and the environment. It is increasingly recognized as a viable source of energy, value-added chemicals such as bioplastics and fuels, and nonrenewable resources. An important example of this is the enhanced biological phosphorus removal process (EBPR), which is one of the most modern wastewater treatment configurations. Not only can EBPR remove contaminating carbon, nitrogen, and phosphate (P) from wastewater but it also recovers the P in a form that is more amendable to reuse than traditional chemical P precipitation. The process will become increasingly viable as a source of phosphate as prices continue rising due to increasing demand and limited global reserves.

What Does Wastewater Treatment Do?

The wastewater treatment processes remove contaminants from the aqueous phase before discharging the effluent into the natural environment. The characteristics of wastewater are the selection criteria based on which biological process is selected and used for treatment. Each biological reactor has its advantages and disadvantages over which municipalities or industries select one of them to get the desired effluent limits. The aerobic process of biological wastewater treatment involves the aeration process as well as a large area of land for installation, which usually increases the cost of treatment.

On the other hand, the anaerobic process does not require aeration, but the maintenance of reactors increases the costs. The modifications in conventional biological systems such as MBR, MBBR, and GST provide excellent treatment efficiency, which lowers maintenance costs. The microbes of the biological system play a key role in biodegradation during operation. Heavy metals exert an adverse effect on microbes and hinder the operation of the treatment plant due to their toxic nature. The effects of heavy metals depend on their type, concentration, and contact time with microbes. Therefore the biological system sometimes may not tolerate the effect of heavy metals in wastewater and stop working. The biological system is thus successful when used for lower concentrations of heavy metals.

How Much Technology Has Developed?

Biological wastewater treatment processes are based on the exploitation of the concerted activity of microorganisms. Knowledge of the microbial community structure and the links to the changing environmental conditions is therefore crucial for the development and optimization of biological systems by engineers. The advent of molecular techniques that occurred in the last decades quickly showed the inadequacy of culture-dependent methodologies to unveil the great level of diversity present in sludge samples. Initially, culture-independent technologies and more recently the application of omics in wastewater microbiology, have drawn a new view of microbial diversity and the function of wastewater treatment systems. This article reviews the current knowledge on the topic placing emphasis on crucial microbial processes carried out in biological wastewater treatment systems driven by specific groups of microbes, such as nitrogen and phosphorus removal bacteria, filamentous and electrogenic microorganisms, as well as Archaea. Despite the recent, omics that have offered substantial insights into the diversity and ecophysiology of these bacteria never envisioned before by providing millions of sequence reads at an unprecedented scale, studies based on high-throughput sequencing are still scarce. In order to obtain significant gains in the analysis of structure-function relationships, a greater sequencing investment is needed, particularly to uncover gene expression patterns of functionally relevant genes.

Concluding Words

Efficiency enhancement of this process occurs through multiple pieces of equipment and technological solutions. Wastewater biological treatment plants utilize clarifiers together with sludge screening and biological treatment along with the wastewater screens to maintain operation efficiency and deliver safe usable water.


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