The large amount of sludge generated during biological wastewater treatment is one of the main problems of a biological treatment. Disposal or the appropriate treatment of waste activated sludge represents up to 65% of the total operating costs of the treatment plant. Wastewater is one of the main sources of antibiotics in the environment. Therefore, it is likely that antibiotics are not completely degraded in the biological treatment process due to their complex structure. Thus, some of the antibiotics can be returned unchanged to the environment, and some can be adsorbed to waste activated sludge, which is later used as a substrate in anaerobic digestion and biogas production. Antibiotics in waste activated sludge inhibit biogas production by limiting the activity of anaerobic microorganisms. Consequently, waste activated sludge needs to be properly processed before entering anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion produces by-products methane, which is a source of renewable energy, and carbon dioxide.
Among all advanced oxidation process techniques, sludge ozonation has shown to be a successful method for the reduction of the inhibition of biogas production due to antibiotic contamination. Ozone is a powerful oxidant that is widely used in wastewater treatment and waste activated sludge treatment. During sludge treatment, ozone is rapidly converted into radicals, which affect the oxidation of both solid particles and soluble organic matter. Among the various advanced oxidation process techniques, ozone treatment is particularly important because no oxidative residues are present after oxidation, and at the same time, the inorganic salts concentration does not increase.
As part of the master's thesis, we examined the effect of ozonation on the effectiveness of anaerobic treatment with antibiotics of contaminated waste activated sludge. We performed the process of ozonation of aerobic sludge contaminated with three different antibiotics (tiamulin, amoxicillin and levofloxacin). We found that the presence of any model antibiotic caused inhibition of biogas production, which was eliminated by 20 minutes of ozonation of contaminated aerobic sludge. After ozonation of contaminated aerobic sludge, the amount of biogas produced increased from 20% to 36% compared to contaminated aerobic sludge. The proportion of methane in the biogas of ozonated contaminated aerobic sludge also increased from 16% to 40% compared to the sample of contaminated aerobic sludge.
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