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Improvement of nitrogen removal with iron scraps in floating treatment wetlands

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Abstract

Floating treatment wetland (FTW) in restoration of low C/N ratio wastewater was deemed to a frequently used method. However, the nitrate removal performance in floating beds was limited due to insufficient organic carbon sources. Iron scraps as a potential electron donor was beneficial to the NO3--N reduction. To research the removal performance and mechanism of denitrification in FTW with iron scraps, FTW with Iris pseudacorus was built, and iron scraps were added as an electron donor to improve nitrogen removal efficiency. The batch experimental results demonstrated that the proper mass ratio of iron scraps to NO3--N was 500:1. With iron scraps, the NO3--N removal efficiency of FTW and control system increased significantly to 98.04% and 44.42% respectively in 2 weeks, while there was no obvious influence on the removal of NH4+-N. After adding iron scraps, the proportion of bacteria in the systems related to iron cycle and the relative abundance of nitrifying and denitrifying bacteria have increased obviously. By calculating the nitrogen balance, nitrogen reduction via plant uptake accounted for 8.79%, and the microbial denitrification was the main nitrogen removal pathway in FTW.

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Funding

This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51678356), the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFC0506003), and the Program for Chinese National Key Projects of Water Pollution Control and Reclamation (2017ZX07205003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dong Chuan Road 800, Shanghai, 200240, People’s Republic of China

    Si Qin, Xiaoyi Zhang, Shengbing He & Jungchen Huang

  2. Shanghai Institute of Pollution Control and Ecological Security, Shanghai, 200092, People’s Republic of China

    Shengbing He

  3. Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Landscape Water Environment, Shanghai, 200031, People’s Republic of China

    Shengbing He

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  1. Si Qin
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  2. Xiaoyi Zhang
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  4. Jungchen Huang
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Si Qin and Xiaoyi Zhang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Si Qin, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shengbing He.

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Qin, S., Zhang, X., He, S. et al. Improvement of nitrogen removal with iron scraps in floating treatment wetlands. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 17878–17890 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12177-x

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