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Microalgal-bacterial granular sludge process outperformed aerobic granular sludge process in municipal wastewater treatment with less carbon dioxide emissions

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Abstract

The aerobic granular sludge (AGS) process and microalgal-bacterial granular sludge (MBGS) process were comparably applied for municipal wastewater treatment in sequencing batch reactors with a height to diameter ratio of eight. For morphological appearances, the yellow aerobic granules were strip-shaped (4.0 mm × 0.62 mm) while the green microalgal-bacterial granules were elliptical-shaped (2.0 mm × 0.75 mm). The dominated rod-shaped bacteria (e.g., Acidobacteria and Bacteroidetes) and the slender configuration might be associated with the strip shape of aerobic granules under weak acid conditions. The nutrients removal performances by MBGS process were generally slightly better than AGS process. In addition, nutrients removal mechanisms were identified to elucidate how organics, ammonia, and phosphorus were removed by AGS process and MBGS process, respectively. Mass balance calculation estimated that MBGS process appeared to achieve much less CO2 emission (5.8%) compared with AGS process (44.4%). Overall, it proved that MBGS process, with the merits of potentially low energy cost, limited CO2 emission, and excellent performance, showed more prospects in municipal wastewater treatment than AGS process.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their constructive comments for improving the quality of this paper.

Funding

This research was financially supported by the Project of Key Laboratory of Healthy and Freshwater Aquaculture, Ministry of Agriculture (ZJK201810), the College Students’ Science and Technology Innovation Fund of WUST (18ZRA023) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51808416).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Water and Wastewater Engineering, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430065, China

    Dabin Guo, Xuechun Zhang, Yuting Shi, Jie Fan & Bin Ji

  2. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Dabin Guo

  3. Advanced Environmental Biotechnology Centre, Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 637141, Singapore

    Dabin Guo & Baihui Cui

  4. Agriculture Ministry Key Laboratory of Healthy Freshwater Aquaculture, Key Laboratory of Fish Health and Nutrition of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang Institute of Freshwater Fisheries, Huzhou, 313001, China

    Julin Yuan

Authors
  1. Dabin Guo
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  2. Xuechun Zhang
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  3. Yuting Shi
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  4. Baihui Cui
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  5. Jie Fan
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  6. Bin Ji
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Contributions

DG and XZ wrote the initial paper including drawing the pictures. XZ and YS performed the research and analyzed the data. JY and JF contributed to the experiment conduction and commented on the initial version of the paper. BJ and BC revised the paper. BJ made substantial contributions to the conception of this paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Bin Ji or Julin Yuan.

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Responsible Editor: Ta Yeong Wu

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Guo, D., Zhang, X., Shi, Y. et al. Microalgal-bacterial granular sludge process outperformed aerobic granular sludge process in municipal wastewater treatment with less carbon dioxide emissions. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 13616–13623 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11565-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11565-7

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