Abstract
Solid waste generation has been projected to increase worldwide. Presently, the most applied methodology to dispose of solid waste is landfilling. However, these landfill sites, over time release a significant quantity of leachate, which can pose serious environmental issues, including contamination of water resources. There exist many physicochemical and biological landfill leachate treatment schemes with varying degrees of success. With an increasing focus on sustainability, there has been a demand for developing eco-friendly, green treatment schemes for landfill leachates with viable resource recovery and minimum environmental footprints. Microalgae-based techniques can be a potential candidate for such a treatment scenario. In this article, research on microalgae-based landfill leachate treatments reported in the last 15 years have been summarized and critically reviewed. The scale-up aspect of microalgae technology has been discussed, and the related critical factors have been elucidated. The article also analyzes the resource recovery potential for microalgal techniques with respect to leachate treatment and explores possible methodologies to minimize the environmental footprints of the microalgae-based treatment process. The future research potential in the area has been identified and discussed.
Highlights
There is a growing need for advanced sustainable treatment technologies focused on resource recovery with minimum environmental footprints which can lead to the removal of contaminants of emerging concern including pharmaceuticals and personal care products (e.g., perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs))
Phycoremediation techniques are relatively novel in the field of landfill leachate treatment
Martins et al (2013) [40] studied a pilot-scale landfill leachate treatment system utilizing a wild consortium of bacteria and microalgae where a series of three ponds and a rock filter was operated for 111 weeks with a continuous flow rate of leachate as 200 L per day
Summary
With the increased focus on integrated solid waste management which includes source reduction of solid waste before they enter the waste stream and resource recovery from generated waste for recycling or composting, the share of landfilling has seen a decline over the years from 94% in 1960 to 53% in 2015. An overview of quantities and the range of some physicochemical characteristics from different sites have been summarized in Tables 1 and 2 [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
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