Exploited application of sulfate-reducing bacteria for concomitant treatment of metallic and non-metallic wastes: a mini review

Abstract

A variety of multidimensional anthropogenic activities, especially of industrial level, are contaminating our aquatic and terrestrial environments with a variety of metallic and non-metallic pollutants. The metallic and non-metallic pollutants addressed specifically in this review are heavy metals and various compound forms of sulfates, respectively. Direct and indirect deleterious effects of the both types of pollutants to all forms of life are well-known. The treatment of such pollutants is therefore much necessary before their final discharge into the environment. This review summarizes the productive utility of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) for economical and concomitant treatment of the above mentioned wastes. Utilization of agro-industrial wastes and some environmental contaminants including hydrocarbons, as economical growth substrates for SRB, is also suggested and proved efficient in this review. Mechanistically, SRB will utilize sulfates as their terminal electron acceptors during respiration while utilizing agro-industrial and/or hydrocarbon wastes as electron donors/carbon sources and generate H2S. The biogenic H2S will then react vigorously with dissolved metals present in the wastewaters thus forming metal sulfide. The metal sulfide being water insoluble and heavier than water will settle down in the water as precipitates. In this way, three types of pollutants i.e., metals, sulfates and agro-industrial and/or hydrocarbon wastes will be treated simultaneously.

Sulfate-Reducing Bacteria as an Effective Tool for Sustainable Acid Mine Bioremediation

“…Sulfate-reducing bacteria have also been successfully applied on the industrial scale for the remediation of acid mine wastewaters. The two patented bioreactors in which SRB has been used are BioSulphide ® , produced by BioteQ Environmental Technologies Inc., Canada and Thiopaq ® , by Paques, The Netherlands ( Kousi et al, 2015 ; Hussain et al, 2016 ). The BioSulphide ® technology has been successfully used to remove sulfate and heavy metals from acid mine drainage to produce high quality and marketable metal sulfides.…”

Preliminary assessment of methanogenic microbial communities in marine caves of Zakynthos Island (Ionian Sea, Greece)

“…Bioremediation of toxic metals, such as U(VI) and Cr(VI), and of various sulphate-containing compounds, as well as the recovery of precious metals from waste streams (e.g. platinum, (Barton & Fauque, 2009;Hussain et al, 2016).…”

Chromium Precipitation Activity and Molecular Characterization of Sulfate-Reducing Bacteria

“…However the application of the sulfate reducing bacteria has been extensively reported in the literature for the treatment of liquid wastes containing chromium (Pagnanelli et al, 2012;Márquezreyes et al, 2013;Gong et al, 2018;Gan et al, 2019;He et al, 2019). The SRB can provide the counter reactant (hydrogen sulfide) for the process of precipitation of metals ions in their form respective sulfides by sulfate reduction process (Hussain et al, 2016). According at Joutey et al (2015), this bacterium is able to remove chromium 100 times faster than the chromium reducing bacterium.…”