Comparative Studies on the Efficiency of Commercial Effective Microorganisms for Treatment of Lipid-containing Wastewater

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the efficacy of three commercial effective microorganisms (EM1, EM2, EM3) in treatment of lipid-containing wastewater. The results showed that EM2 was the best candidate in reduction of 500 mg/l lipid content at 73.33 ± 4.71% in 200 ml synthetic wastewater (SWO) after incubation at room temperature with shaking at 200 rpm for 4 days. The optimum conditions for lipid treatment of EM2 were 1,000 mg inoculums incubated for 4 days. The microcosm test without additional nutrients was later conducted using real lipid-containing wastewater collecting from the female dormitory cafeteria of Rambhai Barni Rajabhat University. The results showed that EM2 had higher efficiency in lipid treatment than indigenous microorganism in wastewater, of which 58.61 ± 6.19 and 9.57 ± 2.66% of the total lipid content were biodegraded by EM2 and indigenous microorganisms, respectively. This could be due to the high efficiency in reduction of lipid contaminated in real wastewater by various strains of effective microbes, which corresponded to the wastewater quality analysis. The results shows that the quality of the EM2-treated water was better than pre-treated wastewater. In which three parameters were obtained at pH 6.7, 96.71 mg/l of COD and 20.7 mg/l of BOD.