Enzymatic Bioregeneration of Activated Carbon by Laccase

Abstract

Activated carbon is widely used in combination with biological treatment systems for the treatment of organic compounds, which are refractory or toxic in conventional biological treatment systems. In these systems, compounds adsorbed on activated carbon may desorb within time due to a concentration gradient between adsorbent and the bulk liquid caused by the biodegradation of substrates in the liquid phase by microorganisms. The desorbed compounds are further biodegraded by microorganisms. This mechanism is called bioregeneration of activated carbon. Previous studies showed that bioregeneration percentages could be higher than the concentration gradient-driven desorbability. This was attributed to exoenzymatic bioregeneration occurring due to the activity of extracellular enzymes secreted by microorganisms in these systems. These extracellular enzymes can diffuse into the activated carbon pores where they can react with the previously adsorbed compounds resulting in their desorption from the carbon surface and degradation. However, the effect of extracellular enzymes on bioregeneration was not conclusively proven in any of the literature studies on bioregeneration because extracellular enzymes were not directly used for the purpose of bioregeneration. In this study, enzymatic bioregeneration of activated carbon was investigated by directly using an extracellular enzyme, laccase, which is known from the literature to catalyze the oxidation reactions of phenolic substances and is commercially available in its pure form. Therefore phenol, 2-nitrophenol, and bisphenol-A were used as the target compounds. For this purpose, batch adsorption, abiotic desorption, enzymatic degradation and enzymatic bioregeneration experiments were performed using two different activated carbon types; thermally and chemically activated ones. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the total enzymatic bioregeneration efficiencies and abiotic desorption efficiencies for each phenolic compound depending on the activated carbon type. Thereby, exoenzymatic bioregeneration has been quantitatively shown for the first time in the literature.