In recent years there has been an increasing demand for a high environmental quality life secured by clean water, air and soil. A clean air has been becoming an important parameter to support a quality urban life since many industrial facilities are being established in the city limits. Hence odor-related complaints are ever increasing these days. In particular, public sewage treatment plants and wastewater treatment plants have been recognized as hatred facilities as they easily become culprits for malodor production sources.
In this study a wastewater treatment plant in Busan has been designated as an odor control site by the Korean Government in 2006 in which tannery and fisheries processing wastewater was treated. Four kinds of microbial agents were chosen to test their efficacy for removal of odor from the wastewater depending on their inoculum amount and treatment time.
The agent MA-1 (treated at 10%, v/v) was highly effective in removal of amines while MA-3 was efficient in removing mercaptans. Less amount of inoculum (5%, v/v) was also tested to investigate the odor removal efficacy for the various agents. Hydrogen sulfide was rapidly removed by treatment of MA-4 while methylmercaptan was effectively removed by MA-2. Dimethyl sulfide was rapidly removed by MA-2 while its removal efficiency was decreased after 8 hr, indicating that there could be a possible presence of reversible reaction of dimethyl sulfide production. Dimethyl disulfide was effectively treated by MA-3 after 8hr. It was concluded that amines from tannery and fisheries processing wastewater were easily removed by treatment of MA-1 that included beneficial microorganisms such as Lactobacillus sp., Prevotellaceae family organisms and Ethanoligenens sp., etc. However, hydrogen sulfide was rapidly removed by MA-4 while dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide were rapidly treated by MA-3. Therefore, these microbial agents seemed to have their own specificity for each odor compound so that it was recommended that a proper combined use of the agents would be more feasible in the field application of the agents, taking their costs into account. It also should be noted that mechanisms behind degradation of these odor chemicals by these agents needs to be elucidated by a further study employing metagenomic and real time RT-PCR technologies, etc.