Two important properties-the low surface free energy of polybenzoxazine (PBZ) and the photocatalysis-induced self-cleaning property of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles-are combined to develop a promising approach for oil/water separation. They are integrated into a multifunctional superhydrophobic and superoleophilic material, PBZ/TiO2 modified polyester non-woven fabrics (PBZT), through a simple dip coating and subsequent thermal curing method. The resulting PBZT reveals excellent mechanical durability and strong resistance to ultraviolet (UV) irradiation as well as acid and alkali. This durable superhydrophobic and superoleophilic fabric is efficient for separating oil/water mixtures by gravity with high separation efficiency, and it can also purify wastewater that contains soluble dyes, which makes it more effective and promising in treating water pollution. Importantly, PBZT demonstrates an integrated self-cleaning performance on the removal of both oil and particle contamination. It is expected that this simple process can be readily adopted for the design of multifunctional PBZ/TiO2 based materials for oil/water separation.

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Biological nitrification/denitrification is frequently used to remove nitrogen from tannery wastewater containing high concentrations of ammonia. However, information is limited about the bacterial nitrifiers and denitrifiers and their functional genes in tannery wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) due to the low-throughput of the previously used methods. In this study, 454 pyrosequencing and Illumina high-throughput sequencing, combined with molecular methods, were used to comprehensively characterize structures and functions of nitrification and denitrification bacterial communities in aerobic and anaerobic sludge of two full-scale tannery WWTPs. Pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genes showed that Proteobacteria and Synergistetes dominated in the aerobic and anaerobic sludge, respectively. Ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) amoA gene cloning revealed that Nitrosomonas europaea dominated the ammonia-oxidizing community in the WWTPs. Metagenomic analysis showed that the denitrifiers mainly included the genera of Thauera, Paracoccus, Hyphomicrobium, Comamonas and Azoarcus, which may greatly contribute to the nitrogen removal in the two WWTPs. It is interesting that AOB and ammonia-oxidizing archaea had low abundance although both WWTPs demonstrated high ammonium removal efficiency. Good correlation between the qPCR and metagenomic analysis is observed for the quantification of functional genes amoA, nirK, nirS and nosZ, indicating that the metagenomic approach may be a promising method used to comprehensively investigate the abundance of functional genes of nitrifiers and denitrifiers in the environment.