Removal of pharmaceuticals in conventionally treated wastewater by a polishing moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) with intermittent feeding

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that aerobic moving bed biofilm reactors (MBBRs) remove pharmaceuticals better than activated sludge. Thus we used a MBBR system to polish the effluent of an activated sludge wastewater treatment plant. To overcome that effluent contains insufficient organic matter to sustain enough biomass, the biofilm was intermittently fed with raw wastewater. The capacity of pharmaceutical degradation was investigated by spiking pharmaceuticals. Actual removal during treatment was assessed by sampling the inlets and outlets of reactors. The removal of the majority of pharmaceuticals was enhanced through the intermittent feeding of the MBBR. First-order rate constants for pharmaceutical removal, normalised to biomass, were significantly higher compared to other studies on activated sludge and suspended biofilms, especially for diclofenac, metoprolol and atenolol. Due to the intermittently feeding, degradation of diclofenac occurred with a half-life of only 2.1h and was thus much faster than any hitherto described wastewater bioreactor treatment.

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

“…Therefore, lab-scale studies evaluating MBBR process as a secondary treatment for CEC removal from wastewater, which were based either on synthetic wastewater or hospital wastewater, are also considered. The contribution of biofilm communities (Torresi et al, 2017), its add-in value inside a hybrid MBBR system (Falas et al, 2013;Escola Casas et al, 2015b) or its contribution as a polishing treatment (Escola Casas et al, 2015b;Tang et al, 2017;Torresi et al, 2017) for CEC removal were also investigated. Details of these studies can be found in Table 6, Table SM5 and Table SM6.…”

Comparative Study of Denitrifying-MBBRs with Different Polyethylene Carriers for Advanced Nitrogen Removal of Real Reverse Osmosis Concentrate

“…So far, MBBR has been widely used to treat various kinds of wastewaters such as paper mill wastewater [27], coal gasification wastewater [28], pharmaceutical industry wastewater [29,30], fish farm wastewater [31], and reverse osmosis concentrate [13,16,32], while the denitrification performance of the systems was affected by the carrier material, configuration, and pore space structure as well as the surface morphology of the biofilm [33]. However, there have been no reports on the deep denitrification of reverse osmosis concentrate by denitrifying MBBR with different configurations of polyethylene carriers, which forms the basis of the current study.…”

Environmental impact and biological removal processes of pharmaceutically active compounds: The particular case of sulfonamides, anticonvulsants and steroid estrogens

“…Thus, the interest in studying HS by combining one or more treatment processes for this purpose has been increasing. Tang et al (2017) found poor removal SMX efficiencies ($10%) and CBZ recalcitrance in a polishing MBBR. In fact, poor removal CBZ efficiencies had been reported beforehand in a hybrid biofilm-activated sludge process and in a MBBR (Falås et al, 2013;.…”