Bioaugmentation: An Emerging Strategy of Industrial Wastewater Treatment for Reuse and Discharge

Alexis Nzila, Shaikh Abdur Razzak and Jesse Zhu
Additional contact information
Alexis Nzila: Department of Life Sciences, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), P.O. Box 468, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia
Shaikh Abdur Razzak: Department of Chemical Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia
Jesse Zhu: Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B9, Canada

IJERPH, 2016, vol. 13, issue 9, 1-20

Abstract: A promising long-term and sustainable solution to the growing scarcity of water worldwide is to recycle and reuse wastewater. In wastewater treatment plants, the biodegradation of contaminants or pollutants by harnessing microorganisms present in activated sludge is one of the most important strategies to remove organic contaminants from wastewater. However, this approach has limitations because many pollutants are not efficiently eliminated. To counterbalance the limitations, bioaugmentation has been developed and consists of adding specific and efficient pollutant-biodegrading microorganisms into a microbial community in an effort to enhance the ability of this microbial community to biodegrade contaminants. This approach has been tested for wastewater cleaning with encouraging results, but failure has also been reported, especially during scale-up. In this review, work on the bioaugmentation in the context of removal of important pollutants from industrial wastewater is summarized, with an emphasis on recalcitrant compounds, and strategies that can be used to improve the efficiency of bioaugmentation are also discussed. This review also initiates a discussion regarding new research areas, such as nanotechnology and quorum sensing, that should be investigated to improve the efficiency of wastewater bioaugmentation.

Keywords: bioaugmentation; biodegradation; bioremediation; industrial wastewater; pollution; bacteria; quorum sensing; nanotechnology; protozoan grazing; bacteriophage; cell-immobilization; transfection and plasmid transfer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/13/9/846/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/13/9/846/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:13:y:2016:i:9:p:846-:d:76727

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().