(103f) Development of a Combined Wastewater Treatment Process for Organic Recalcitrant Substances

Biological wastewater treatments consist of a conglomerade of different microorganisms, mainly bacterias, that perform a continuous and sequencial attack over the organics in the wastewater. This process are the most commonly used, because of they are cost effective, efficients and do not generate contaminant byproducts. Nevertheless, there are many substances that are recalcitrants or toxic to biological process. This problem become crucial for Pharmaceutical or Biotechnological Industries that use this type of substances in the production processes, in inactivating or decontaminating of areas or materials used or for the destruction of biological vaccines based on high risk microorganism. Thus, there is necessary the development of a wastewater treatment process able to degrade this organic contaminants and the microorganism elimination. The net effect in the full process must be directed to the environmental preservation. In the present work, a combined stage by stage process was developed for the decontamination of the wastewater in the experimental vivario in the Enterprise Group for Biopharmaceutical and Chemical Production LABIOFAM; which apply a biological treatment and an advanced oxidation process. The study was perform in two choices that afford up to 99 % of COD reduction. The first choice is an anaerobic biological treatment and a Fenton Process. For the second choice, an aerobic biological treatment was implemented before the Fenton Process. The comparison of this two methodologies, in addition to a third choice in which a Fenton Process was directly applied to the income wastewater, was performed for the yield of the whole process and the cost of the treatments.