Abstract
In recent years, the use of microalgae as feedstock for many marketable products, such as animal/aqua feeds, bioplastics and fertilizers, has gained renewed interest due to their fast growth potential coupled with relatively high lipid, carbohydrate and nutrient content. An algal biorefinery at an industrial site has the potential to sustainably and profitably convert carbon dioxide emissions into microalgal biomass and concomitantly reduce nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewaters. Industrial wastewaters are a potential alternative to traditional media used for large-scale microalgal cultivation. Pulp and paper mills are major consumers of water resources and discharge a huge amount of water to nearby lakes or rivers. This study investigated whether pulp and paper mill waste water is suitable for microalgal cultivation with the aim of achieving significant biomass production. Six different process waters from one Canadian pulp and paper mill were tested with two freshwater green microalgae. All of these waters were unable to support growth of microalgae due to inadequate nutrient concentrations, colour, turbidity and possible toxicity issues.
Highlights
Microalgae are a large and diverse group of photosynthetic microorganisms
The purpose of this study is to investigate if the different pulp and paper mill wastewaters collected from different processing steps at Port Hawkesbury Paper mill can be used as a suitable medium for microalgal growth
Dictyosphaerium sp. (MSWW S7) is an inhouse strain that was originally isolated from the Mill Cove wastewater treatment plant in Bedford, Nova Scotia, and has been shown to grow very well on wastewater effluents (Park et al )
Summary
Microalgae are a large and diverse group of photosynthetic microorganisms. With little more than photons, water, and a few essential nutrients, microalgae reduce CO2 to carbohydrates. Large-scale microalgal cultivation has several advantages over traditional agricultural production of cash crops. These include greater rates of areal productivity, the ability to use marginal lands for cultivation and the potential to use nutrient-rich wastewater streams (McGinn et al ). Research has started to focus on exploiting wastewater rather than freshwater as a growth medium for. Nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations can be 10–100 mg·LÀ1 in municipal wastewaters and >1,000 mg·LÀ1 in agricultural wastewaters These high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus support robust growth of many different species of freshwater microalgae and thereby represent a very effective remediation strategy at the same time (Woertz et al ; Mohsenpour et al )
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