Abstract
Municipal and industrial wastewater treatment facilities play a major role in treating wastewater to produce healthy waters for humankind and ecosystems. Huge quantity of wastewater sludge has been produced in these treatment processes/plants. Conventional (physico-chemical) sludge treatment methods are expensive, laborious and may causes pollution in the receiving ecosystem. It is desirable to treat sludge with green biotechnology. In this chapter, recent applications and development of green biotechnology to treat and manage both municipal and industrial wastewater and sludge are reviewed. One focus of the review is on applications of green biotechnology in wastewater treatment processes such as nutrient removal, foam control, improvement of sludge dewatering and (aerobic and anaerobic) digestion as well as control of pathogens in wastewater sludge. Another focus of the review is on bioconversion of wastewater sludge to value-added products such as bioenzymes (laccases, degradative enzymes and proteases), bioethanol and biodiesel, bio-fertilizer and bio-composting, bioflocculants/biopolymers, bio-pesticides, and bioplastics. Some details are described on how to promote bioconversion of wastewater sludge to value-added products. While the development of green biotechnology in wastewater treatment is yielding tremendous benefits and forging an innovative economy, more studies and tests at the field scale would lead to full-scale application of these technologies in the near future.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Green Chemistry for Environmental Remediation |
| Publisher | John Wiley and Sons |
| Pages | 627-660 |
| Number of pages | 34 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780470943083 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 10 2012 |
Keywords
- Bioethanol
- Biopesticides
- Bioplastics
- Biopolymers and microorganisms
- Enzymes
- Green biotechnology
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Environmental Science