Biological sulfate removal from construction and
demolition debris
Pimluck Kijjanapanich1*, Ajit P. Annachhatre2, Giovanni Esposito3, Eric D. van Hullebusch4
and Piet N.L. Lens1
1
UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Westvest 7, 2611 AX Delft, The Netherlands
Environmental Engineering and Management, Asian Institute of Technology, PO Box 4, Klongluang, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand
3
Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering University of Cassino and the Southern Lazio Via Di Biasio, 43 - 03043 Cassino (FR),
Italy
4
Université Paris-Est, Laboratoire Géomatériaux et Environnement (EA 4508), UPEMLV, 77454 Marne-la-Vallée, France
*Corresponding author email: som_cheng00@hotmail.com
2
Gypsum is mined and converted into several products. It is very useful especially in
construction as a major component in drywalls or gypsum board. However, solid wastes
containing gypsum are also created during construction, renovation as well as demolition of
building or road. This kind of solid wastes namely as construction and demolition debris
(CDD). CDD can lead to exceptionally high levels of biogenic sulfide formation, when it is
disposed together with organic wastes in the landfill site. Therefore, disposal of this kind of
solid wastes requires special places (separate from organic wastes) to prevent serious
problems of odor control and landfill gas purification. This reason results in the increasing of
disposal cost of CDD (Gypsum Association, 1992). Moreover, this kind of solid wastes
cannot be reused either for soil amendment or construction purpose because it contains sulfate
and heavy mental which can contaminate into environment and change the properties of
construction materials.
Figure 1. The reactors for construction and demolition debris (CDD) treatment
Reducing of the sulfate content of this solid waste by biological sulfate reduction is an option
to overcome and solve these problems. However, research on biological sulfate reduction still
has mainly focused on treatment of sulfate containing wastewater (Kijjanapanich et al.,
2012b; Liamleam and Annachhatre, 2007). In contrast, solid wastes containing sulfate are also
an important pollutant. Therefore this study aims to develop a biological sulfate reduction
system to treat solid wastes containing gypsum as CDD. This treatment system is developed
in order to decrease the amount of solid wastes as well as improve its quality for the recycle
purpose. The idea of this treatment concept (Figure 1) is gypsum which containing in CDD is
leached out by water in the leaching column (Kijjanapanich et al., 2012a). Then the leachate
containing sulfate is further treated by biological sulfate reduction system in the Upflow
Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) reactor. The UASB was operated using ethanol as electron
donor at the hydraulic retention time (HRT) and upflow velocity of 15.5 h and 0.1 m h-1,
respectively. This investigation demonstrated that the CDD is thus a source of sulfate for SRB
and the biological sulfate reduction process can be used for the treatment of CDD. The sulfate
removal efficiency of the system stabilized at around 85%, supporting the reuse of the treated
effluent from the UASB reactor for the leaching step.
REFERENCES
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Gypsum Association, 1992. Treatment and disposal of gypsum board waste: Technical paper part II, AWIC’s Construction
Dimensions. AWIC.
Kijjanapanich, P., Annachhatre, A.P., Lens, P.N.L., 2012a. Biological sulfate reduction for treatment of gypsum contaminated soils,
sediments and solid wastes. Crit. Rev. Environ. Sci. Technol. In Press.
Kijjanapanich, P., Pakdeerattanamint, K., Lens, P.N.L., Annachhatre, A.P., 2012b. Organic substrates as electron donors in permeable
reactive barriers for removal of heavy metals from acid mine drainage. Environ. Technol. 33, 2635-2644.
Liamleam, W., Annachhatre, A.P., 2007. Electron donors for biological sulfate reduction. Biotechnol. Adv. 25, 452-463.