Abstract
Copper and zinc are routinely used in livestock antimicrobial footbaths in commercial farming. The footbath mix is a cost to farmers, and the disposal of spent footbath into slurry tanks leads to soil contamination, as well as the potential for antimicrobial metal resistance and co-selection. This study assesses the potential to mitigate a source of antimicrobial metal resistance in slurry tanks while recovering copper and zinc from spent cattle footbaths. This is the first study in literature to investigate the potential of recovering copper from cattle footbath solutions via any method. The sorbent, Ca2Al-EDTA Layered Double Hydroxides (LDH), were used to remove Cu2+ from a Cu2SO4·5H20 solution at different temperatures. The maximum Cu2+ uptake from the Cu2SO4·5H20 solution was 568 ± 88 mg g−1. Faster and higher equilibrium uptake was achieved by increasing the temperature of the solution. The sorbent was found to be effective in removing copper and zinc from a commercially available cattle footbath solution (filtered footbath solution Cu2+ uptake 283 ± 11.05 mg g−1, Zn2+ uptake 60 ± 0.05 mg g−1). Thus, this study demonstrates the opportunity for a completely novel and potentially economically beneficial method of mitigating antimicrobial resistance in agriculture and the environment, while also providing a new valuable copper and zinc waste stream for secondary metal production.
Highlights
Agricultural systems have been reported to be one of the key routes for the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) within the environment (Department of Health, 2014)
The pH of the used footbath and fresh footbath solutions analysed in this study were 2.9 and 2.7 pH respectively, which is typical for solution containing heavy metal ions (Hashim et al, 2011) and prevents the precipitation of the copper hydroxide (Pavlovic et al, 2009)
The ICP shows that the waste footbath includes high levels of other elements, which may adsorb to the Layered double hydroxides (LDH) sorbent
Summary
Agricultural systems have been reported to be one of the key routes for the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) within the environment (Department of Health, 2014). Footbaths containing up to 10% copper and zinc sulphate are used on dairy farms for mass preventative treatment of cattle lameness caused by bacterial infections such as digital dermatitis (Holzhauer et al, 2012). After use, these footbath solutions are usually disposed of in slurry tanks, where they can reside for up to several months, before commonly being spread on to the land (Laven and Logue, 2006). Eliminating the disposal of waste cattle footbath into slurry tanks could potentially provide a plentiful source of recoverable copper and zinc, and reduce the environmental impact of spreading slurry while mitigating this potential source of AMR co-selection and metal resistance (Department of Health, 2014; Hobman and Crossman, 2015)
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