Chapter 2 - Biofiltration treatment of wastewater through microbial ecology

Abstract

The vast exploitation of limited resources of water and the requirement to maintain good characteristics of water for drinking uses has resulted in enhanced attention for reusing the wastewater in the past few years. The dispose of household along with industrial wastewater in the surface and groundwater resources is tremendously damaging to the environment. But similar to domestic sewage, the industrial water waters require biological treatment for effective removal of the organic pollutants. Biofiltration is a new technology used to purify contaminated air evolved from volatile organic and inorganic compounds by involving microorganisms. It is a low-cost technology gradually becoming popular due to simple operational and waste-removal efficiencies. Biological treatment processes are employed for the treatment of wastewater in an aesthetic, harmless, reliable, and economical manner. There are many technologies that have been developed for treatment to fill up the gap of demand and supply in inexpensive ways. Numerous technologies are as activated sludge process, extended aeration, fluidized bed reactor, sequential batch reactor, and membrane bio-reactor, etc., used for wastewater treatment. Biological wastewater treatment processes are based on the exploitation of the concerted activity of microorganisms. Knowledge of the microbial community structure and the links to the changing environmental conditions is therefore crucial for the development and optimization of biological systems by engineers. Initially, culture-independent technologies and more recently the application of omics in wastewater microbiology have drawn a new view of microbial diversity and the function of wastewater treatment systems. In this chapter, the current knowledge on the topic emphasizing crucial microbial processes carried out in biological wastewater treatment systems driven by specific groups of microbes, such as nitrogen and phosphorus removal bacteria, filamentous, and electrogenic microbes.