Bioremediation

Bioremediation has become a general term describing a process of degrading harmful or hazardous contamination into less harmful or benign components. In the industrial fields, the process harnesses microbial activities and products to aid in the cleanup of sites contaminated with organic pollutants¹.

It is an emerging treatment technology that can restore contaminated sites quicker, at a lower cost, and at lower human risk than alternative remediation technologies ². Studies and case histories show how bioremediation can effectively rid a spill site of organic contaminants with fewer machine and labor costs and less profile in congested or neighborhood areas.

a: Costs are per cubic yard, 1993 dollars. Actual costs impacted by time and competition. [Micro-Blaze usage costs are usually substantially lower.]
b: If project warrants year two and three costs, these are average costs shown per cubic yard.
Original source: Bioremediation Report, King Publishing Group, Washington, D.C. , 1993.

In addition to the lower costs of bioremediation, there is no long-term or "cradle to grave" liabilities for the contamination like there is with landfilled pollutants because the contaminants have been digested and turned into harmless by products of CO₂, water and trace inorganic salts. Contaminated sites that can benefit from bioremediation exist in a variety of environments including surface soils and waters as well as shallow or deep subsurface environments ³.

There are two main avenues of bioremediation operation: In situ can be used where excavation is impractical - under highways, buildings, runways, etc. This process can simultaneously treat soil and groundwater in one step, without the generation of hazardous waste products. Using an engineered treatment setup where contamination is placed for bioremediation is called an ex situ process (bioslurry, bioreactor, landfarming, etc.)

There exists in all the world's soils and waters resident microbes that take care of digesting the usual waste streams found in its surrounding ecosystem. These are called indigenous microbes. Testing has been done to see if using these existing microbial populations, a process called natural attenuation, would remediate the contamination that entered the area. More often than not, very little remediation has occurred ⁴.

Biostimulation, using aeration and adding fertilizers to supply nutrients to the indigenous microbes, also has drawbacks. It relies on the assumption that the existing microbes will be in large enough numbers to effectively degrade the contaminant and that they can readily adapt to the foreign contamination to start any degradation. This method usually results in a lengthy timeline for a project to come to closure.

Adding microbes that already have an aggressive affinity towards common hydrocarbon and organic contamination is described as bioaugmentation. Applying a sufficient amount of adapted microbes to the pollution site takes care of the contamination in a timely and efficient manner. There are variables to the amount of microbes to use - volume of contaminant, type and volatility of contaminants, pH of the soil or water, temperature, etc.

The several strains of Bacillus spores in Micro-Blaze^® microbial products provide a synergistic degradation of the organic and hydrocarbon pollutants caused by industrial and commercial processes. Its combination of surfactants, nutrients (like Verde's Budkicker) and microbes make it an ideal formulation for use on many pollutants found in spills and contaminated sites:

For information on specific bioremediation methods of contamination treatment, please call your Micro-Blaze distributor or e-mail or call the Verde Environmental home office at 1-800-626-6598.

1: "Bioremediation may be key for soil and ground water pollution cleanup", Cornell University Science News, October 1993.

2: "Bioremediation", a course illustration for the Soil, Water and Environmental Science department, University of Arizona.

3: "Field-Scale Bioremediation", course outline introduction, on website, University of California at Berkeley.

4. Ibid.

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