Abstract
Contamination in subsurface environment is a serious environmental hazard. Main sources of the contamination are petrol, diesel fuel, gasoline at oil refineries, underground storage tanks, transmission pipelines and different industries. Permeable reactive barriers (PRBs), which is a promising technology to remediate groundwater in-situ, are filled with reactive materials for the removal of the contaminants present in groundwater. In this study, groundwater contaminated with toluene is treated in reactor columns by biological processes. This study was conducted to assess the impact of bioaugmentation (BA) and biostimulation (BS) on toluene degradation efficiency. After 44 days of treatment, toluene concentrations were decreased from 5 mg/l to 4.304 mg/l by the natural attenuation treatment (Reactor 2), which represents a 13.9% removal efficiency. Toluene was reduced to 0.0239 mg/l in the biostimulation and bioaugmentation treatment (Reactor 1), which represents a toluene removal efficiency of 99.5%. This study showed that the toluene removal efficiency in the combined BA and BS process was much higher than in natural attenuation (NA) process tested.
Highlights
Contamination in subsurface environment has become a serious environmental hazard in recent years
Results of this study showed that combining BS and BA has a higher effect on biodegradation efficiency than natural attenuation (NA) process
Petroleum hydrocarbons remaining in water for a long time after contamination along with costly treatment methods have made them one of the most important environmental pollutants
Summary
Contamination in subsurface environment has become a serious environmental hazard in recent years. Main sources of the contamination are petrol, diesel fuel, gasoline at oil refineries, underground storage tanks, transmission pipelines and non-petroleum related industries. These hazardous contaminants are in the EPA’s (U.S Environmental Protection Agency) priority pollutant lists. Some of that chemicals in the fossil fuels tend to persist in the environment for a long time These persistent contaminants have several health risks to humans, animals, and other living organisms. This threat needs to be removed carefully from the subsurface environment. Especially petroleum hydrocarbons, from soil and groundwater through bioremediation technologies has been commonly practiced by researchers and industry. Bioremediation has been commonly used for cleaning up soil and groundwater contaminated sites and is an environmentally friendly and cost-effective remediation technology
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