At the moment not even in Europe, but also globally, water ecosystems suffer a tremendous load of slowly biodegradable substances – antibiotics. Surface or ground water ecosystems are negatively affected by these substances – more resistant to antibiotics microorganisms develop; therefore, in case of spread diseases new and more advanced antibiotics have to be developed. In order to limit the exposure of antibiotics to water ecosystems, effective biological-adsorption processes can be successfully used as end of pipe technologies. In this systems negative effect of antibiotics is being reduced to a threshold level during adsorption, which gives a tendency for the acclimated biomass to mineralize antibiotics even further. If the mezo-macro porous adsorbent are being used together with active microbial biomass, this results in more efficient adsorbent regeneration and increased lifetime, together with satisfactory removal of nitrogen and phosphorous. During this project it is planned to investigate the potential of mezo-macroporous adsorbent to remove antibiotics from polluted water. Based on the obtained results final report and recommendations will be prepared.
Project funding:
Project is funded by EU Structural Funds according to the 2014–2020 Operational Programme for the European Union Funds’ Investments priority “Development of scientific competence of researchers, other researchers, students through practical scientific activities” under Measure No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712.
Period of project implementation: 2019-10-15 - 2020-05-31
Project coordinator: Kaunas University of Technology
