Phenolic compounds are toxic organic pollutants that are released into the environment through wastewater discharged from several industries. Biodegradation is considered as a most suitable ecofriendly approach for the removal of phenolic waste. Experiments were conducted based on response surface methodology in the batch system to evaluate the requirement of optimum inoculum density, phenol concentration, and incubation period for degradation phenol by strain Bacillus cereus PB1 isolated from polluted site. Box–Behnken design used to analyze the interactions among variables for maximum phenol degradation. Results show optimized parameters of 1% (v/v) initial inoculums, 650 mg L−1 of phenol concentration, and 36 hours of incubation period enhance phenol degradation (402 mg L−1). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted, and the F‐value was 302.77, which implies that the model is significant. The predicted R‐squared of 0.9590 is close to the adjusted R‐squared of 0.9941, and the P value gives the significance of the coefficient and also indicates the pattern of interactions between the coefficients. Further immobilization experiments performed under an optimized condition infer improved phenol degradation by immobilized cells (464.52 mg L−1). An attempt to investigate the supplementation of culture for increasing adsorption efficiency along with thermally treated rice straw proven about 96.56% of phenol removal.

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