Microbial Biofilms for Efficient Biological Wastewater Treatment: Mechanisms, Challenges, Opportunities and Future Perspectives

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Biofilm technologies in wastewater treatment can be operated at higher organic and hydraulic loads, have compact foot print area, reduced cost of aeration, and reduced sludge handling costs. Over the last half-century, the history of wastewater treatment has seen the development of various biofilm technologies such as Rotating Biological Contactor (RBC), Trickling Filter (TF), Moving Bed Biofilm Reactor (MBBR), and more recently, Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) that are not only involved in the removal of carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur but also actively involved in the removal of recalcitrant contaminants. These systems nevertheless are challenged by sloughing, clogging, and lower diffusion rates of substrates, which have resulted in outnumbering by highly efficient suspended biomass technologies in the last few decades. However, new challenges like emerging contaminants and cost economics in wastewater management are pushing treatment processes from being energy-intensive to energy negative processes. Hence, it is high time to revisit the sustainable biofilm technologies and revamp them up for their bottlenecks. Fundamental research into biofilm technologies for wastewater management is warranted to revive the existing biofilm technologies. This chapter reviews various biofilm technologies on the basis of their performance and stability. The mechanism, challenges, and opportunities of these biofilm technologies in the area of wastewater treatment are also discussed.