Sustainable biological system for the removal of high strength ammoniacal nitrogen and organic pollutants in poultry waste processing industrial effluent.

The effluent generated from poultry waste processing industries contains several organic compounds such as collagen, gelatin, bovine serum albumin, carbohydrates, essential fatty acids, and so forth. This enabled the establishment of poultry waste processing industries to produce value-added products such as animal feed and organic fertilizers. During poultry waste processing, huge amounts of ammoniacal nitrogen and organic pollutants such as proteins, various carbohydrates, and fatty materials are discharged into the effluent stream which contributes to several environmental issues. Because of the shortcomings of the current conventional treatment, the present study is about with the development of a sequential bioreactor system for the effective treatment of poultry waste processing industrial effluent. Facultative anaerobe FMR19 along with the indigenous isolate MN527241 obtained from clarifying sludge was used as mixed consortia for the treatment of poultry waste processing industrial effluent. The mixed microbial consortia resulted in the maximum activity of enzymes such as protease (247 U/mL) and lipase (28.266 U/mL) thereby achieving 90% of ammoniacal nitrogen reduction and 98% of COD removal within five days. Further, the confirmatory analysis of poultry effluent treatment was carried out using gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GC-MS), High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), and SDS-PAGE. Hence, the sequential bioreactor-based treatment approach has proved to be highly effective in removal of organic pollutants in the poultry waste processing industrial effluent.: The poultry waste processing industrial (PWPI) effluent contains huge ammoniacal nitrogen and COD and affects the environment. Aerobic moving bed biofilm reactor and up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor are in current practice and shows considerable reduction in the ammoniacal nitrogen and COD in long retention time. Therefore, there is a need of sustainable treatment process that could effectively remove the organic pollutants from the effluent in short duration. Our study focused on the application of sequential bioreactor approach for the treatment of PWPI using aerobic followed by anaerobic treatment process and observed efficient organic pollutants removal in short duration.