Objective
Heavy metal pollution is one of the most important environmental problems today even threatening human life. A large number of industries produce and discharge wastes containing different heavy metals into the environment and do not comply with current EU directives. BIOMETAL DEMO project aims at demonstrating the feasibility of the application of novel biotechnologies for the treatment of metal polluted wastewaters though the development of two pilot plants to be implemented in two metal polluting representative industries which are a mine and an electroplating company.
Actual metal treatment technologies implemented in polluting industries fail to comply with the reduction of metal concentration required by the EU for wastewater treatments. For this reason, new technologies will be developed to overcome this problem.
The biotechnologies that will be evaluated in BIOMETAL DEMO project will be: metal bioprecipitation by sulphate-reducing bacteria and immobilized phytase biocatalysis, and metal biosorption on agricultural industry by-products and biopolymers such as alginate & chitosan based materials.
After the evaluation of these techniques, an optimized bioprocess or a synergy of two integrated bioprocesses will be selected to design and build two demonstration pilot plants for scaling-up the metal removal biotreatment.
The feasibility of the application of the selected bioprocess will be explored at pilot plant scale in acid mine drainage and electroplating wastewaters contaminated with heavy metals.
The operation will be monitored and optimized, and the kinetics and the performance of the metal removal/recovery bioprocess will be integrated within the pilot demonstration plants. Finally, an economic, social and technical analysis of the benefits of such tertiary biotreatment of metal polluted industrial wastewater will be carried out for the corresponding and related industrial sectors across EU.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwater treatment processeswastewater treatment processes
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologybacteriology
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinephysiotherapy
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
- natural scienceschemical sciencescatalysisbiocatalysis
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-ENV-2013-WATER-INNO-DEMO
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
CP - Collaborative project (generic)Coordinator
28021 Madrid
Spain