The protection and conservation of natural resources is one of the main priorities of modern society. Water is perhaps our most valuable resource, and thus should be recycled. Many of the current recycling techniques for polluted water only concentrate the pollutant without degrading it or eliminating it. In this sense, advanced oxidation processes are possibly one of the most effective methods for the treatment of wastewater containing organic products (effluents from chemical and agrochemical industries, the textile industry, paints, dyes, etc.). More conventional techniques cannot be used to treat such compounds because of their high chemical stability and/or low biodegradability. This article describes, classifies, and analyzes different types of advanced oxidation processes and their application to the treatment of polluted wastewater.

The bacterial community structure of 10 different wastewater treatment systems and their influents has been investigated through pyrosequencing, yielding a total of 283486 reads. These bioreactors had different technological configurations: conventional activated sludge (CAS) systems and very highly loaded A-stage systems. A-stage processes are proposed as the first step in an energy producing municipal wastewater treatment process. Pyrosequencing analysis indicated that bacterial community structure of all influents was similar. Also the bacterial community of all CAS bioreactors was similar. Bacterial community structure of A-stage bioreactors showed a more case-specific pattern. A core of genera was consistently found for all influents, all CAS bioreactors and all A-stage bioreactors, respectively, showing that different geographical locations in The Netherlands and Spain did not affect the functional bacterial communities in these technologies. The ecological roles of these bacteria were discussed. Influents and A-stage bioreactors shared several core genera, while none of these were shared with CAS bioreactors communities. This difference is thought to reside in the different operational conditions of the two technologies. This study shows that bacterial community structure of CAS and A-stage bioreactors are mostly driven by solids retention time (SRT) and hydraulic retention time (HRT), as suggested by multivariate redundancy analysis.

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Two-stage technologies have been developed for anaerobic digestion of waste-activated sludge. In this study, the archaeal and bacterial community structure dynamics and bioprocess performance of a bench-scale two-stage anaerobic digester treating urban sewage sludge have been studied by the means of high-throughput sequencing techniques and physicochemical parameters such as pH, dried sludge, volatile dried sludge, acid concentration, alkalinity, and biogas generation. The coupled analyses of archaeal and bacterial communities and physicochemical parameters showed a direct relationship between archaeal and bacterial populations and bioprocess performance during start-up and working operation of a two-stage anaerobic digester. Moreover, results demonstrated that archaeal and bacterial community structure was affected by changes in the acid/alkalinity ratio in the bioprocess. Thus, a predominance of the acetoclastic methanogen Methanosaeta was observed in the methanogenic bioreactor at high-value acid/alkaline ratio, while a predominance of Methanomassilicoccaeceae archaea and Methanoculleus genus was observed in the methanogenic bioreactor at low-value acid/alkaline ratio. Biodiversity tag-iTag sequencing studies showed that methanogenic archaea can be also detected in the acidogenic bioreactor, although its biological activity was decreased after 4 months of operation as supported by physicochemical analyses. Also, studies of the VFA producers and VFA consumers microbial populations showed as these microbiota were directly affected by the physicochemical parameters generated in the bioreactors. We suggest that the results obtained in our study could be useful for future implementations of two-stage anaerobic digestion processes at both bench- and full-scale.

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