Antibiotics are widely used in the livestock for the purposes of disease prevention and treatment, as well as growth promotion of animals as feed additives. Its environmental residues and related antibiotic resistance genes pose a major threat to human health and ecological environment, how to effectively remove antibiotics has to be settled urgently. The dean of The Environmental Research Institute, South China Normal University, professor Guangguo Ying and postdoctor Jun Chen investigate the removal efficiency and mechanism for antibiotics in swine wastewater by a biological aerated filter system (BAF system) in combination with laboratory aerobic and anaerobic incubation experiments. The results from this pilot study showed efficient removals of the conventional wastewater pollutants (BOD5, COD, TN and NH3-N) and detected antibiotics by the BAF system. Laboratory simulation experiment showed first-order dissipation kinetics for the detected antibiotics in the wastewater under aerobic and anaerobic conditions. The biodegradation kinetic parameters successfully predicted the fate of the detected antibiotics in the BAF system. This suggests that biodegradation was the dominant process for antibiotic removal in the BAF system, and the BAF system could be a promising technology for the removal of emerging contaminants such as antibiotics in the livestock wastewater. This has been published in the journal of Bioresource Technology.
Reference: Chen J, Liu YS, Zhang JN, Yang YQ, Hu LX, Yang YY, Zhao JL, Chen FR, Ying GG (2017) Removal of antibiotics from piggery wastewater by biological aerated filter system: Treatment efficiency and biodegradation kinetics. Bioresource Technology 238, 70-77.