Solving Environmental Waste Water, Soil, Sludge, Groundwater,
And Bio-
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Bioaugmentation Contiued..........
The use of biological additives continued to spread in spite of resistance by
the academic community, which believed in the principle of microbial infallability—that
indigenous microbes could adapt to and eventually degrade any organic compound that
man could produce, without assistance. New strains of bacteria were developed with
significant activity in environments that included the great majority of those organic
compounds on the EPA “Restricted” list.
The production methods, then and now,
did not involve gene splicing. They consisted of selecting a bacterial strain known
to have some activity in the presence of the compound to be degraded, adapting it
to progressively higher concentrations of that material, selecting the most active
colonies and subjecting them to a process to make the adaptation more permanent.
The resultant microbe was then grown in quantity in fermentation vessels and preserved
as a liquid suspension or a solid for later applications.
Microbes produced this
way have improved the operation of wastewater treatment plants subjected to toxic
or inhibitory loads of phenol, formaldehyde, tannins and lignins, chlorinated hydrocarbons,
oil refinery wastes and a variety of other organics to which a natural biomass is
slow to adapt. They also have been used to restart plants after upsets caused by
toxic waste streams or overloading, when the standard practice of seeding with municipal
sludge had failed.
Such documented successes, however, still failed to convince
skeptics, who attributed them to anything but bioaugmentation. “Bugs” were too simple
and inexpensive a solution to hazardous wastes.
Ironically, a breakthrough occurred
in 1978 as a result of a test by Exxon Corp. Exxon operated a split-
The results, in a plant which could be expected to
be fully adapted to refinery wastes, led to increased use of bacterial additives
in hydrocarbon wastewater processing. The success of microbial additives in treatment
plants led in turn to their use for bioremediation.
Bioremediation
There is no
single bioremediation process. The selection of hydrocarbon-
Finally, and perhaps most important, the kinetics of biodegradation
of the target materials must be quantified to provide a basis for design and management
of the process to be employed.
Continue Reading.... Controlling The Bioremediation Process.......
