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Reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit

To preserve environmental and human health, improved treatment processes are needed to reduce nutrients, microbes, and emerging chemical contaminants from domestic wastewater prior to discharge into the environment. Electrocoagulation (EC) treatment is increasingly used to treat industrial wastewate...

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Autores principales: Symonds, E. M., Cook, M. M., McQuaig, S. M., Ulrich, R. M., Schenck, R. O., Lukasik, J. O., Van Vleet, E. S., Breitbart, M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369739/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25797885
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep09380
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author Symonds, E. M.
Cook, M. M.
McQuaig, S. M.
Ulrich, R. M.
Schenck, R. O.
Lukasik, J. O.
Van Vleet, E. S.
Breitbart, M.
author_facet Symonds, E. M.
Cook, M. M.
McQuaig, S. M.
Ulrich, R. M.
Schenck, R. O.
Lukasik, J. O.
Van Vleet, E. S.
Breitbart, M.
author_sort Symonds, E. M.
collection PubMed
description To preserve environmental and human health, improved treatment processes are needed to reduce nutrients, microbes, and emerging chemical contaminants from domestic wastewater prior to discharge into the environment. Electrocoagulation (EC) treatment is increasingly used to treat industrial wastewater; however, this technology has not yet been thoroughly assessed for its potential to reduce concentrations of nutrients, a variety of microbial surrogates, and personal care products found in domestic wastewater. This investigation's objective was to determine the efficiency of a benchtop EC unit with aluminum sacrificial electrodes to reduce concentrations of the aforementioned biological and chemical pollutants from raw and tertiary-treated domestic wastewater. EC treatment resulted in significant reductions (p < 0.05, α = 0.05) in phosphate, all microbial surrogates, and several personal care products from raw and tertiary-treated domestic wastewater. When wastewater was augmented with microbial surrogates representing bacterial, viral, and protozoan pathogens to measure the extent of reduction, EC treatment resulted in up to 7-log(10) reduction of microbial surrogates. Future pilot and full-scale investigations are needed to optimize EC treatment for the following: reducing nitrogen species, personal care products, and energy consumption; elucidating the mechanisms behind microbial reductions; and performing life cycle analyses to determine the appropriateness of implementation.
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spelling pubmed-43697392015-04-06 Reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit Symonds, E. M. Cook, M. M. McQuaig, S. M. Ulrich, R. M. Schenck, R. O. Lukasik, J. O. Van Vleet, E. S. Breitbart, M. Sci Rep Article To preserve environmental and human health, improved treatment processes are needed to reduce nutrients, microbes, and emerging chemical contaminants from domestic wastewater prior to discharge into the environment. Electrocoagulation (EC) treatment is increasingly used to treat industrial wastewater; however, this technology has not yet been thoroughly assessed for its potential to reduce concentrations of nutrients, a variety of microbial surrogates, and personal care products found in domestic wastewater. This investigation's objective was to determine the efficiency of a benchtop EC unit with aluminum sacrificial electrodes to reduce concentrations of the aforementioned biological and chemical pollutants from raw and tertiary-treated domestic wastewater. EC treatment resulted in significant reductions (p < 0.05, α = 0.05) in phosphate, all microbial surrogates, and several personal care products from raw and tertiary-treated domestic wastewater. When wastewater was augmented with microbial surrogates representing bacterial, viral, and protozoan pathogens to measure the extent of reduction, EC treatment resulted in up to 7-log(10) reduction of microbial surrogates. Future pilot and full-scale investigations are needed to optimize EC treatment for the following: reducing nitrogen species, personal care products, and energy consumption; elucidating the mechanisms behind microbial reductions; and performing life cycle analyses to determine the appropriateness of implementation. Nature Publishing Group 2015-03-23 /pmc/articles/PMC4369739/ /pubmed/25797885 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep09380 Text en Copyright © 2015, Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder in order to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
Symonds, E. M.
Cook, M. M.
McQuaig, S. M.
Ulrich, R. M.
Schenck, R. O.
Lukasik, J. O.
Van Vleet, E. S.
Breitbart, M.
Reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit
title Reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit
title_full Reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit
title_fullStr Reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit
title_full_unstemmed Reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit
title_short Reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit
title_sort reduction of nutrients, microbes, and personal care products in domestic wastewater by a benchtop electrocoagulation unit
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369739/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25797885
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep09380
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