Group Engineering and Environmental Chemistry (GIQA) URJC evaluated the effect emerging contaminants, such as drug moieties or pesticides, the efficiency of fototóficas purple bacteria in sewage treatment. Thus, they have shown that these compounds do not exert a substantial negative effect on the activity of these bacteria, so its presence is not a limitation in resource recovery processes present in wastewater. Furthermore, to evaluate the persistence of contaminants in water have shown that these microorganisms are able to remove a high proportion of emerging compounds, hardly need acclimatization (just a few days), which represents a significant advantage over other technologies standard biological.

In this work, researchers have also studied the potential conversion of PPB in high value - added products, particularly in biogas through anaerobic digestion process. "The purple phototrophic bacteria are microorganisms with a high metabolic versatility. Biomass composed of these bacteria has a high power energy and high nutrient content, making it an interesting substrate for biogas or for producing organic fertilizers , "says Daniel Puyol, lead author of the study published in the scientific journal Journal of Hazardous Materials .

The results obtained have been found that the accumulation of contaminants on emerging bacteria is very limited and does not exert any adverse effect on conversion into biogas. "The potential for resource recovery from the PPB is helped enormously by this important finding scientific, which is an advantage of this technology over its competitors in the field of resource recovery and new concepts of biorefining wastewater, "says the researcher URJC.

Biological technologies: the challenge of removing emerging contaminants

Emerging pollutants are highly persistent and in some cases highly toxic substances, which are present in the wastewater in very low concentration, which makes it more difficult to remove by conventional processing techniques. Several studies have shown that persistence can cause harmful effects on the environment and in humans because of its potential accumulation in living organisms. Therefore, for some decades they have been developing various technologies 'destructive' for disposal, which are already in commercialization stage.

However, current trends in the treatment of wastewater intended to employ efficient technologies for resource recovery technologies avoiding the use of 'destructive'. New techniques used, mainly biological, involve transforming the main water pollutants (organic compounds and nutrients as nitrogen and phosphorus) in products of high added value, which can be used as raw material in the industrial production cycle.

In this sense, the results of the work done by researchers at the URJC open the door to new techniques to meet the challenge of removing emerging contaminants persistent with technologies not 'destructive' and without diminishing its potential value and even marketing .

esquemaPPB ok

Figure 1: Schematic of the system used to treat wastewater contaminated with compounds emerging through a photo-bioreactor anaerobic membrane, containing purple phototrophic bacteria.
the analytical protocol used for determining the concentration of compounds emerging in different parts of the process is also shown.
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