Biological Sulfur-Oxidizing Potential of Primary and Biological Sludge in a Tannery Wastewater Treatment Plant

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is one of the major tannery wastewater pollutants. Up today, chemical scrubbing is the most established technology for H2S removal in wastewater treatment plants. However, this procedure increases both the operating costs and the carbon footprint of the treatment. On the other hand, biological treatment is an emerging and sustainable technology for air pollution control. Our study focuses on the biological sulfur-oxidizing potential of autochthonous sludge of a plant treating tannery wastewater, located in Santa Croce (Tuscany, Italy). We propose a multidisciplinary approach to investigate two aspects: first, the composition of the microbial community both in the biological sludge and in the primary sludge and second, the sulfur-oxidizing potential of these native matrices. In order to do that, biological and primary sludge were used as inoculum in a reactor fed with sulfides. Then, traditional cultivation techniques were combined with several molecular approaches for analyzing the microbial community structure with a special focus on sulfur-oxidizing bacteria (SOB). Our study demonstrated that the use of different techniques was fundamental in order to detect the largest number of sulfur-oxidizing bacterial components; in particular, the detection of less represented components was guaranteed only by the performed multidisciplinary approach. Our study demonstrated the optimal performances of the reactor in selecting a sulfur-oxidizing biomass from autochthonous matrices. In addition, the importance of the primary sludge as inoculum for sulfuroxidizing reactors was proved.