Microplastics affect membrane biofouling and microbial communities during gravity-driven membrane filtration of primary wastewater

Recently, gravity-driven membrane (GDM) filtration has been adopted as an alternative solution for decentralized wastewater treatment due to easy installation and maintenance, reduced energy and operation cost, and low global warming impact. This study investigated the influence of microplastic size (0.5-0.8 μm and 40-48 μm) and amount (0.1 and 0.2 g/L) on the membrane performance and microbial community in GDM systems for primary municipal wastewater treatment. The results showed that dosing microplastics in the GDM systems led to 9-54% lower permeate flux than that in the control. This was attributed to more cake formation (up to 6.4-fold) with more deposition of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS, up to 1.5-fold) and divalent cations (up to 2.1-fold) in the presence of microplastics, especially with increasing microplastic amount or size. However, the dosed microplastics promoted formation of heterogeneous cake layers with more porous nature, possibly because microplastics created void space in the cake and also tended to bind with divalent cations to reduce EPS-divalent cations interactions. In the biofilm of the GDM systems, the presence of microplastics could lower the number of total species, but it greatly enhanced the abundance of certain dominant prokaryotes (Phenylobacterium haematophilum, Planctomycetota bacterium, and Flavobacteriales bacterium), eukaryotes (Stylonychia lemnae, Halteria grandinella, and Paramicrosporidium saccamoebae), and virus (phylum Nucleocytoviricota), as well as amino acid and lipid metabolic functions. Especially, the small-size microplastics at a higher dosed amount led to more variations of microbial community structure and microbial metabolic functions.