Biofilters: A Solution for Heavy Metals Removal from Water?

Debora Frigi Rodrigues

ISSN: 2155-6199

Journal of Bioremediation & Biodegradation

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Biofilters: A Solution for Heavy Metals Removal from Water?

Debora Frigi Rodrigues^*
University of Houston,4800 Calhoun Road, N136 Engineering Bldg. 1, Houston, TX 77204-4003
Corresponding Author :	Debora Frigi Rodrigues University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun Road, N136 Engineering Bldg. 1, Houston, TX 77204-4003 Tel: (713) 743-1495 Fax: (713) 743-4260 E-mail: dfrigirodrigues@uh.edu
Received March 25, 2011; Accepted March 26, 2011; Published March 28, 2011
Citation: Rodrigues DF (2011) Biofilters: A Solution for Heavy Metals Removal from Water? J Bioremed Biodegrad 2:e101. doi: 10.4172/2155-6199.1000e101
Copyright: © 2011 Rodrigues DF. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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The presence of heavy metals in industrial and domestic wastewater has been a major environmental issue. In the United States only, manufacturers spend approximately $1.8 billion per year to remove heavy metals from industrial wastewater in order to meet EPA requirements. Today, in industrial settings there are a few technologies that are able to remove heavy metals from water. Just to name a few, there are ion exchange systems, physical/chemical treatment systems, and microfiltration membrane systems. In most cases, these techniques are either expensive or, in the case of chemical treatment systems, require chemicals that work better with higher concentrations of heavy metals.

Domestic wastewater treatment plants, however, are not designed or equipped for handling toxic wastes due to the large volume of influent. If the sewage is contaminated with heavy metals, their toxicity will persist in the sludge and by-products. The most appropriate procedure to remove heavy metals from the sewage would be to do a pre-treatment step prior to the conventional wastewater treatment. This pre-treatment must be effective and cheap. These requirements make most of the industrial heavy metal removal technologies unsuitable for heavy metal removal in domestic wastewater or even for countries under development because they tend to be very expensive.

More recently, researchers have started to study applications of biofilters to bioabsorb or bioaccumulate heavy metals as an alternative method to conventional treatment techniques. This technique has gained popularity over the years due to good performance, availability and low cost of raw materials. Microorganisms including bacteria, algae, fungi and yeasts have been shown to accumulate or to absorb heavy metals from the environment. These organisms are capable of utilizing the substrate rapidly. Their small size produces a high surface-to-volume ratio ideal for rapid pollutant uptake. The major limitations of the current biofilters are that different microorganisms used in the biofilters have diverse levels of heavy metal tolerance and different removal specificity for certain heavy metals. However, new and promising studies are currently being done on the improvement of the biofilters efficiency by modifying genetically microorganisms with genes of metal resistance to make them more tolerant and more effective in the removal of diverse heavy metals.

Although the biofilter technology for the removal of heavy metals is still in its infancy, the concept of biofilter has been already widely and successfully used for the removal of several other pollutants in the air and water. Hence, the usage of biofilters for the removal of heavy metal seems to be really promising, for domestic sewage and for countries under development that needs cheap and fast solutions to deal with these pollutants.