Biodegradation of naphthalene, phenanthrene, and pyrene under anaerobic conditions

The biodegradation of naphthalene, phenanthrene, and pyrene were studied in batch reactors using an anaerobic acetate-fed enrichment culture developed from the Greater Peoria Sanitary District Wastewater Treatment Facility. Baseline kinetic experiments showed that maximum specific substrate utilization for the acetate-fed enrichment culture was 2.72 mg acetate/mg cell/day and the endogenous decay coefficient was 0.043 day(-1). Maximum specific substrate utilization rates in mg substrate/mg cell/day for naphthalene, phenanthrene and pyrene were 0.57, 0.009 and 0.007, respectively. The half saturation constant K-S in mg/L were 0.075, 0.01 and less than 0.01, respectively. The endogenous decay coefficient (in units of day(-1)) in the presence of naphthalene, phenanthrene and pyrene were 0.06, 0.07 and 0.04, respectively. Results from this study indicated that naphthalene and phenanthrene were more easily biodegradable than pyrene. These results suggest that technologies using anaerobic biodegradation using a relatively simple enrichment culture from a wastewater treatment plant may be successful in treating PAH contaminated wastes.