Microorganisms that you can't see are becoming a new force in sewage treatment

Using microbial technology to treat urban and rural sewage has low energy consumption, high efficiency, small amount of residual sludge, convenient operation and management, and can also achieve phosphorus recovery and recycling of treated water. At present, microbial technology has gradually developed into an effective means to solve prominent environmental problems such as water pollution.

Water is an important resource indispensable for the sustainable development of society. With the development of urbanization and the advancement of industrialization, more and more pollutants that are difficult to remove enter the natural water environment, affecting water quality and ultimately endangering human health.

Long-term practice has proved that traditional sewage treatment methods can hardly meet the removal needs of existing water pollutants, so research and development of new and effective treatment technologies is the current main task.

Microbial treatment technology has attracted the attention of many scholars at home and abroad due to its advantages such as good pollutant treatment effect, high enrichment rate of dominant strains, high microbial activity, strong resistance to environmental interference, low economic cost and reusability. With the development of technology, microorganisms that can "eat pollution" have gradually been widely used in the field of sewage treatment.

Microbial technology has obvious advantages in treating urban and rural sewage

Water pollution usually refers to the deterioration of water quality and the reduction of water use value caused by human factors. The main pollutants include solid waste, aerobic organic matter, refractory organic matter, heavy metals, plant nutrients, acid, alkali and petroleum substances and other chemical substances.

At present, traditional sewage treatment either separates insoluble pollutants through physical methods such as gravity sedimentation, coagulation clarification, buoyancy, centrifugal separation, magnetic separation, or transforms pollutants through chemical methods such as acid-base neutralization, chemical precipitation, oxidation-reduction, etc. In addition, dissolved pollutants in water can be separated by using adsorption, ion exchange, membrane separation, evaporation, freezing, etc.

However, among these traditional methods, treatment plants that use physical methods for sewage treatment usually occupy a large area, have high infrastructure and operating costs, high energy consumption, complex management, and are prone to sludge swelling. The equipment cannot meet the requirements of high efficiency and low consumption; chemical methods have high operating costs, consume a large amount of chemical reagents, and are prone to secondary pollution.

Using microbial technology to treat urban and rural sewage has low energy consumption, high efficiency, small amount of residual sludge, convenient operation and management, and can also achieve phosphorus recovery and recycling of treated water. Wang Meixia, a teacher at the Inner Mongolia Baotou Light Industry Vocational and Technical College who has been engaged in bioengineering and environmental governance research for a long time, said that microbial technology has gradually developed into an effective means to solve prominent environmental problems such as water pollution.

Tiny microorganisms achieve miracles in "practical combat"

In the New Year of the Year of the Tiger, it is clear after the snow in Caohai, Weining, Guizhou. Hundreds of black-necked cranes dance gracefully on the lake. Groups of gray geese sometimes soar low and sometimes play in the water. Egrets pace and hunt on the shore, attracting passers-by to stop. Watch, take photos and videos. Weining Caohai is a typical plateau freshwater lake and the largest natural freshwater lake in Guizhou. In the past few decades, with the increase in population and frequent human activities, Weining Caohai was once on the verge of disappearing, and the water body became eutrophic.

The team led by Zhou Shaoqi, Vice President of Guizhou University, has overcome long-term insurmountable problems in the field of biological denitrification research in the world, and skillfully used microbial denitrification technology to give Caohai a new lease of life. At the same time, Zhou Shaoqi's team also promoted the application of new technologies and engineering to the fields of urban sewage, oil refining wastewater, landfill leachate and rural sewage, and achieved remarkable results in pollution control.

In 2016, the black and smelly water bodies of Xiaohe and Leifeng Rivers in Changsha High-tech Zone attracted criticism. Hunan Sanyou Environmental Protection Technology Co., Ltd. used the water microbial activation system to eliminate the black and odor problem in Xiaohe River in just one and a half months, making microbial technology famous. "By effectively activating water microorganisms and causing them to continue to multiply in large numbers, we reorganize, improve and optimize the water microbial ecosystem and restore the water body's self-purification ability," said Dr. Yi Jing of the company.

Coincidentally, in the West Lake Garden of Changhai New Village, Yangpu District, Shanghai, in a pond covered by large blue algae, the turbid green dirty water turned into a clear stream for fish to swim in, and the water quality of the lake also changed from worse than Category 5 to Category 2 or 3. What created this miracle was an innovative technology developed by the Environmental New Technology Team of Tongji University - the water microbial activation system. This technology has also been applied to the 300,000-square-meter Haidong Wetland ecological restoration and purification project on the east coast of Dianchi Lake in Yunnan.

In 2024, my country has launched a number of policies involving sewage treatment to promote the utilization of sewage resources. The annual sewage treatment capacity has been increased, and investment in industrial sewage treatment has increased. At present, with the transformation of scientific and technological achievements and the rise of a number of domestic biological environment management companies, microbial sewage treatment will be widely used in various fields such as construction, agriculture, transportation, energy, petrochemicals, environmental protection, urban landscape, medical catering, etc.