Phycoremediation of Petroleum Hydrocarbon-Polluted Sites: Application, Challenges, and Future Prospects
Impoverished communities everywhere in the world face challenges with respect to the treatment of wastewater. In particular, rural areas and remote communities with low socioeconomic conditions may lack conventional centralized wastewater treatment system
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troduction The expanded generation, transport, utilization, and transfer of mixed petrochemicals have made these one of the main contaminants in nature (Margesin 2000). Aromatic mixes and their quality in the soil and groundwater framework is of great concern because these contaminants exist as discrete stages that cause danger in the long term to downstream receptors. The most extreme permissible levels for these mixes in drinking water are 1 ppm for the benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene (BTEX pollutants (USEPA 2006). Although hydrocarbon pollutants do not form a homogeneous mixture when mixed with water, their solubility is a few levels in extent greater than the admissible limit for drinking water (Voudrias and Yeh 1994). Some of the traditional remediation methods such as pump-and-treat, air sparging, booming and skimming used for the removal of these mono-aromatic pollutants are not only typically costly but also destroy the native biota capable of natural bioremediation (Basu et al. 2015; Gupta et al. 2013). Moreover, these techniques might result in incomplete mass removal or toxicity and are often not feasible in remote locations (Olson and Sale 2015; Van Stempvoort and Biggar 2008). The other promising technique is bioremediation in which microbes degrade contaminants into harmless products. This natural bioremediation is safer and less disruptive than some of the conventional technologies; however, it takes quite a long time to restore the polluted site under prevailing environmental conditions (Abhishek et al. 2018a, b). Therefore, engineered bioremediation techniques such as biostimulation, and phyto/phycoremediation, are gaining popularity because of their faster P. K. Gupta, PhD (*) · S. Ranjan Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Department of Hydrology, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India S. K. Gupta Environmental Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 S. K. Gupta, F. Bux (eds.), Application of Microalgae in Wastewater Treatment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13913-1_8
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rates of remediation. In designed bioremediation, the microbial populations and their encompassing ecological conditions are in fact altered to hasten the procedure of biodegradation. Phycoremediation offers cost-effective, nonintrusive, and safe cleanup technology in which the potential macro- or microalgae are used to treat a large group of pollutants. These photoautotrophic species act as ecological biotransformers to pollutants originating from wastewater discharge. Algae contain chlorophyll, which transforms sunlight and CO2 into chemical energy for its growth. Most algae grow comparatively faster than other plants, resulting in faster removal/biotransformation of pollutants by easier uptake of water and nutrients/pollutants. Algae can survive better under nutrient stress and limited conditions by fixing atmospheric nitrogenN. Overall, the potential treatment of polluted sites using
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