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Use of recycled single-use plastics as bio-carrier for wastewater treatment
Summary
Scientists turned single-use plastic waste into tiny carriers that host helpful bacteria for cleaning up factory wastewater, and it worked just as well as commercial products already used for this purpose. This matters because it gives discarded plastic a useful second life instead of letting it break down into microplastics that pollute waterways and potentially end up in the food we eat — a true win-win for both wastewater treatment and plastic pollution reduction.
Single-use plastic waste poses significant environmental challenges, particularly through microplastic pollutionin aquatic ecosystems. In this study, a bio-carrier was fabricated from recycled single-use plastic waste, and itsperformance was evaluated in a laboratory-scale moving bed biofilm reactor combined with membrane filtration(MBBR-MBR) for treatment of wastewater coming from aquatic product processing factory. The recycled carriersexhibited physical properties suitable for biofilm growth and achieved treatment efficiencies comparable tocommercial K3 media, effectively reducing COD, BOD5, total nitrogen, and total phosphorus to meet the VietnameseQCVN 11-MT:2015 level-A standard. These findings indicate that use of recycled plastic bio-carriersoffers a win-win solution both in terms of sustainable approach for wastewater treatment as well as minimizingthis plastic waste.