Anaerobic removal of contaminants of emerging concern in municipal wastewater: Eco-toxicological risk evaluation and strategic selection of optimal treatment.

In the last decades, the interest for anaerobic process as a mainstream treatment of municipal wastewater increased due to the development of high-rate anaerobic bioreactors able to achieve removal kinetics comparable to the aerobic ones. Moreover, they have the additional advantages of energy production, nutrient recovery and reduced excess sludge yield, which are interesting features in the frame of sustainability wastewater treatment goals. These appealing factors increased the research demand to evaluate the potential of the anaerobic removal for contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in municipal wastewater.

Performance of secondary wastewater treatment methods for the removal of contaminants of emerging concern implicated in crop uptake and antibiotic resistance spread: A review.

Contaminants of emerging concern (CEC) discharged in effluents of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), not specifically designed for their removal, pose serious hazards to human health and ecosystems. Their impact is of particular relevance to wastewater disposal and re-use in agricultural settings due to CEC uptake and accumulation in food crops and consequent diffusion into the food-chain. This is the reason why the chemical CEC discussed in this review have been selected considering, besides recalcitrance, frequency of detection and entity of potential hazards, their relevance for crop uptake.

Enhancing anaerobic treatment of domestic wastewater: State of the art, innovative technologies and future perspectives.

Recent concerns over public health, environmental protection, and resource recovery have induced to look at domestic wastewater more as a resource than as a waste. Anaerobic treatment, owing to attractive advantages of energy saving, biogas recovery and lower sludge production, has been suggested as an alternative technology to the traditional practice of aerobic wastewater treatment, which is energy intensive, produces high excess of sludge, and fails to recover the potential resources available in wastewater. Sewage treatment by high-rate anaerobic processes has been widely reported over the last decades as an attractive method for providing a good quality effluent.

Method for technical, economic and environmental assessment of advanced sludge processing routes.

The legislative framework in force in Europe entails restrictive effluent standards for sensitive areas, and quite severe restrictions on the properties of residual sewage sludge, both for landfill disposal and for agricultural use. Several technologies and management strategies have been proposed and applied in wastewater treatment plants to minimise sludge production and contamination. However, their techno-economic and environmental performance has to be carefully evaluated.

Methodology for technical and economic assessment of advanced routes for sludge processing and disposal.

In order to meet the environmental legislative framework in force in Europe and reduce sludge processing and disposal costs, several sludge treatment technologies and management strategies have been proposed in the last two decades. The evaluation of their technical and economic suitability, case by case, may be a challenge, since many aspects are involved, so that a robust decision support system should be used. Within the ROUTES project (founded within the EU Seventh Framework Programme), the authors have developed an assessment procedure which allows rating several technical factors (such as system reliability, complexity, safety aspects, modularity, etc.

Biodegradation of phenolic mixtures in a sequencing batch reactor. A kinetic study.

Goal, Scope And Background: In this study, attention was focused on substituted phenols because of their widespread presence in industrial effluents originating from many different sources: they are major constituents of wastewater from coal conversion processes, coke ovens, petroleum refineries and petrochemical industries, resin and fibreglass manufacturing and herbicide production. Moreover, for their characteristics of toxicity to humans and aquatic life (1 mgl(-1) is enough to detect the effects), they are included in the USEPA list of priority pollutants. Toxicity is higher in substituted phenols and is dependent on the nature and numbers of substituent groups.

Microbial and kinetic characterization of pure and mixed cultures aerobically degrading 4-nitrophenol.

The molecular and kinetic characterization of a microorganism able to aerobically degrade 4-nitrophenol (4NP) is presented. The microorganism was isolated from a mixed culture operating in a laboratory-scale sequencing batch reactor with an aerobic anoxic cycle. It was identified as a member of Ralstonia genus within Betaproteobacteria.

Treatment options for tannery wastewater II: integrated chemical and biological oxidation.

This is the second of two papers each dealing with a specific technological option for replacing the Fenton's reagent with simpler processes for treating industrial wastewater. In particular, the paper reports the results of an investigation aimed to check, at lab scale, the effectiveness of an alternative wastewater treatment combining biological degradation and chemical oxidation with ozone. The treatment was carried out in a lab scale hybrid reactor fed with the biological stage effluent of a plant treating the wastewater of a large tanning district in Central Italy whose residual COD result still higher than the Italian COD Maximum Allowable Concentration (MAC) value (i.