Treating wastewater with aerobic granules
© 2013 EPFL
Under the right conditions, the sludge of bacterial and protozoan organisms which are used to remove carbon, nitrogen, and phosphate from water in wastewater treatment plants will aggregate into solid granules.
Their higher density, faster settling rates and microbiological diversity give these granules the potential to outperform the floccular bacterial sludge traditionally used in today’s wastewater treatment facilities. At the same time they allow to reduce the footprint of the facilities and the cost of the treatment. Researchers from the Laboratory for Environmental Biotechnology are tackling two of the remaining obstacles that stand in the way of successfully applying this technology: accelerating the aggregation and maturation of the granules, and increasing their microbiological and physical stability. In a recent publication they demonstrated the importance of growing the right microbiological population, down to the bacterial subtype, to ensure efficient removal of the pollutants.