Simultaneously attenuating antibiotic resistance genes and improving the dewaterability of sewage sludge by conditioning
- PDF / 932,726 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 56 Downloads / 182 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Simultaneously attenuating antibiotic resistance genes and improving the dewaterability of sewage sludge by conditioning with Fenton’s reagent: the pivotal role of sludge pre-acidification Jiajun Wang 1 & Xiaoqing Meng 1 & Yu Chen 1 & Guanyu Zheng 1,2,3 & Lixiang Zhou 1,2 Received: 12 June 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Fenton conditioning processes have been recently employed to improve the dewaterability of sewage sludge. However, it remains unclear whether the conditioning with Fenton’s reagent would simultaneously attenuate antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in sludge and improve sludge dewaterability. It was found in the present study that sludge pre-acidification played a pivotal role in simultaneously removing ARGs and improving sludge dewaterability by conditioning with Fenton’s reagent. When the sewage sludge was pre-acidified to pH = 3.0 and was then conditioned using Fenton’s reagent, the absolute abundances of the total ARGs and the total mobile genic elements (MGEs) in conditioned sludge were reduced by 1.85–2.10 and 2.84–3.12 log units, respectively. Additionally, sludge capillary suction time (CST) and specific resistance to filtration (SRF) were drastically reduced, and the moisture content (MC) in dewatered sludge cake was reduced to only 60.61–69.95%. Such effective attenuation of ARGs and MGEs in conditioned sludge led to their removal in both the dewatered sludge cakes and dewatering filtrate. However, only the improvement of sludge dewaterability was attained by sludge conditioning with Fenton’s reagent but without sludge pre-acidification. During the conditioning treatment, the removal of loosely bound extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) and tightly bound EPS in conditioned sludge contributed to the improvement of sludge dewaterability, and the damage of sludge microbial cells was highly correlated with the attenuation of antibiotic resistance. Thus, sludge preacidification combined with conditioning using Fenton’s reagent can be employed to simultaneously attenuate the antibiotic resistance in sewage sludge and improve sludge dewaterability. Keywords Sewage sludge . Fenton’s reagent . Antibiotic resistance genes . Dewaterability . Pre-acidification
Introduction The biological wastewater treatment processes are utilized in worldwide wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) to treat municipal wastewater, which produces large amounts of Responsible Editor: Vítor Pais Vilar * Guanyu Zheng [email protected] 1
Department of Environmental Engineering, College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, China
2
Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Solid Organic Waste Resource Utilization, Nanjing 210095, China
3
Department of Environmental Engineering, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, People’s Republic of China
sewage sludge (Zhou et al. 2014; Feng et al. 2015; Gherghel et al. 2019). The high-efficient dewatering of sewage sludge and the
Data Loading...
