Pre-treatment of Wastewater with Carbon Materials to Achieve Efficient Treatment of Full-Strength Wastewater by Microalgae

Dear Colleagues,

With growing economic development and the increase in population, the pollution and shortage of water resources has become a global problem. The annual production of wastewater from the municipal, agricultural, and industrial fields is huge, containing excessive nutrients, and improper treatment may lead to environmental problems such as the eutrophication of water bodies. Microalgae-based wastewater treatment technology can not only purify wastewater and solve environmental pollution problems but also use the nutrient elements in wastewater to produce algal biomass, which has attracted more and more attention. However, although wastewater can be treated by microalgae to recycle nutrients, the toxic levels of ammonia and organic matter hinder their growth. Before using full-strength wastewater for microalgae culture, pretreatment is necessary. Up to now, dilution, flocculation, biological contact oxidation, and ozonation are fairly mature technologies for wastewater pretreatment. However, all these techniques have certain drawbacks. For example, dilution requires large amounts of freshwater, which increases the burden of the process.

In recent years, the application of low-cost carbon materials as environmentally friendly adsorbents for nutrients recovery has attracted great attention recently. Carbon materials, mainly including activated carbon, carbon nanotubes, graphene, zeolite and biochar, etc., have good adsorption properties due to their large specific surface areas and obvious porous properties on the surface. For example, biochar is widely recognized as an important cost-effective adsorbent. Since biochar is produced using various types of biomass, including agricultural residues, algal biomass, forest residues, animal manure, sludge, and food processing waste, the raw materials used for its preparation determine that biochar is environmentally friendly and sustainable. Most importantly, biochar has been widely studied as an adsorbent for the removal of contaminants from wastewater due to its unique characteristics, such as having a large surface area, well-distributed pores and high abundance of surface functional groups. Studies have shown that biochar can be used as an effective adsorbent for organic and inorganic substances in wastewater. The use of biochar for pretreatment of complex wastewater would be a good choice.

This Special Issue of Sustainability aims to provide a feasible and sustainable approach to remediate wastewater, produce value-added microalgal biomass, and recycle used carbon materials, further promoting the industrialization of algae-based wastewater remediation.

Dr. Qi Zhang
Prof. Dr. Yunpu Wang
Dr. Xian Cui
Guest Editors

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