Preliminary Study for the Arsenate Removal in a Synthetic Wastewater by Acclimated Cultures

Abstract

Many exhaustive studies of health risks associated with low-level arsenic have been recently published. Arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh provides an unfortunate reminder of the scale this problem can attain. The increasing awareness of toxicity and pollution of arsenic led to a quest for environment-friendly remediation processes in water treatment system at discharge of arsenic to acceptable level. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the possibility to remove arsenate from water by using phototropic organisms inoculated from the sludge collected from local wastewater treatment plant. The best arsenate removal efficiency was 25.7% in the time period of 14 days. Although the removal efficiency was not high enough to become an independent process, these promising results obtained in laboratory scale experiments still proved that it is feasible to remove arsenate from wastewater by acclimated cultures. This study also offers the results of effects of environmental parameters on arsenate removal. These preliminary results could offer the data for the wastewater treatment plant to evaluate the possibility to combine this bioremediation technology into their existing treatment processes to increase the total arsenic removal efficiency or decrease the load of expensive processes applied to the arsenic removal.