• ZnO-NP disrupted metabolic/catabolic balance of bacteria by affecting DHA activity.• ZnO-NPs toxicity was related to Zn2+ ion, interaction with cell and ROS generation.• Exposure to ZnO-NPs resulted in changed bacterial community structure at sludge.• The change in the EPS content was observed during exposure to ZnO-NPs. The unique properties and growing usage of zinc oxide nanoparticles increase their release in municipal wastewater treatment plants. Therefore, these nanoparticles, by interacting with microorganisms, can fail the suitable functioning of biological systems in treatment plants. For this reason, research into the toxicity of ZnO is urgent. In the present study, the toxicity mechanism of ZnO-NPs towards microbial communities central to granular activated sludge (GAS) performance was assessed over 120-day exposure. The results demonstrate that the biotoxicity of ZnO-NPs is dependent upon its dosage, exposure time, and the extent of reactive oxygen species (ROS) production. Furthermore, GAS performance and the extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) content were significantly reduced at 50 mg/L ZnO-NPs. This exposure led to decreases in the activity of ammonia monooxygenase (25.2%) and nitrate reductase (11.9%) activity. The Field emission scanning electron microscopy images confirmed that ZnO-NPs were able to disrupt the cell membrane integrity and lead to cell/bacterial death via intracellular ROS generation which was confirmed by the Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy analysis. After exposure to the NPs, the bacterial community composition shifted to one dominated by Gram-positive bacteria. The results of this study could help to develop environmental standards and regulations for NPs applications and emissions. 相似文献
● Collaborative treatment of plastics and OS was established to improve oil quality.● PE addition successfully improved OS pyrolysis process by deploying H/Ceff ratio. ● Higher H/Ceff ratio promoted cracking to obtain more gas and light oil fractions. ● The degradation of PE and OS was promoted each other under their temperature range. Pyrolysis is an effective method to treat oily sludge (OS) due to its balance between oil recovery and nonhazardous disposal. However, tank bottom OS contains a high content of heavy fractions, which creates obstacles for pyrolysis due to the high activation energy. The incomplete cracking of macromolecules and secondary polymerization decreases the oil quality and causes coking during the operation process. This study introduced polyethylene (PE) into OS to deploy the H/Ceff ratio of feedstocks for pyrolysis. A strong interaction between OS and PE during copyrolysis could be observed from the TG/DTG curves. PE tightly participated in OS degradation, while OS also promoted PE degradation at high temperature. Apparent pits were generated in solid residues from copyrolysis, which was attributed to the uniform and violent gas release. In addition to HCN, other nitrogenous and sulphurous pollutants were inhibited. Accordingly, more gas products were attained after PE addition with more value-added compositions of alkanes and alkenes. Although the oil yield decreased after PE addition, the oil products from copyrolysis possessed higher heating values and higher contents of light fractions with short chains as well as paraffins. Consequently, copyrolysis of OS and PE significantly improved the pyrolysis process and resulted in high oil quality. 相似文献
• Retrofitting from CAS to MBR increased effluent quality and environmental benefits.• Retrofitting from CAS to MBR increased energy consumption but not operating cost.• Retrofitting from CAS to MBR increased the net profit and cost efficiency.• The advantage of MBR is related to the adopted effluent standard.• The techno-economy of MBR improves with stricter effluent standards. While a growing number of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are being retrofitted from the conventional activated sludge (CAS) process to the membrane bioreactor (MBR) process, the debate on the techno-economy of MBR vs. CAS has continued and calls for a thorough assessment based on techno-economic valuation. In this study, we analyzed the operating data of 20 large-scale WWTPs (capacity≥10000 m3/d) and compared their techno-economy before and after the retrofitting from CAS to MBR. Through cost-benefit analysis, we evaluated the net profit by subtracting the operating cost from the environmental benefit (estimated by the shadow price of pollutant removal and water reclamation). After the retrofitting, the removal rate of pollutants increased (e.g., from 89.0% to 93.3% on average for NH3-N), the average energy consumption increased from 0.40 to 0.57 kWh/m3, but the operating cost did not increase significantly. The average marginal environmental benefit increased remarkably (from 0.47 to 0.66 CNY/g for NH3-N removal), leading to an increase in the average net profit from 19.4 to 24.4 CNY/m3. We further scored the technical efficiencies via data envelopment analysis based on non-radial directional distance functions. After the retrofitting, the relative cost efficiency increased from 0.70 to 0.73 (the theoretical maximum is 1), while the relative energy efficiency did not change significantly. The techno-economy is closely related to the effluent standard adopted, particularly when truncating the extra benefit of pollutant removal beyond the standard in economic modeling. The modeling results suggested that MBR is more profitable than CAS given stricter effluent standards. 相似文献
• The promoting effects for VFA generation follow the order of APG>SDBS>HTAB.• Surfactants improve the WAS solubilization/hydrolysis and acidification processes.• The VFA promotion is associated with surfactants’ distinctive characteristics.• Surfactants induce the enrichment of functional bacteria for VFA biosynthesis.• The vital genes for substrates delivery, metabolism, and VFA yields are upregulated. Surfactants were expected to exhibit positive effects on the waste activated sludge (WAS) disposal. However, the systematic comparison of different categories of surfactants on the WAS fermentation and the functional mechanisms, especially microbial metabolic traits, have not yet been precisely explored. This study revealed the positive effects of different surfactants on the volatile fatty acid (VFA) production, which followed the order of alkyl polysaccharides (APG)>sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate (SDBS)>hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (HTAB). Mechanistic exploration found that the presence of different surfactants improved solubilization and hydrolysis steps, and then contributed to the subsequent acidification with different efficiencies. The functional microorganisms associated with VFA generation were enriched in surfactant-conditioned reactors. Metagenomic analysis further indicated that the key genes involved in the particular process of VFA generation were over-expressed. The simultaneous bioavailable substrate improvement, functional bacterial enrichment, and metabolic activity upregulation induced by different surfactants jointly contributed to VFA promotion during WAS fermentation. This study could provide a comprehensive realization of surfactants’ impacts on the WAS fermentation process, and more importantly, it reminded the public to discern the distinct interplaying effects induced by different chemicals in regulating the WAS disposal and resource recovery. 相似文献