Assessment of air purification biosystems for environmental applications

Abstract

Biotechnologies involving microbial and plant - assisted biofiltration are emerging options for solving air pollution issues, especially as they can contribute to the environmental protection in a sustainable manner. The environmental application of plant-microbial based biosystems can be however hampered by some conditions, such as the low diurnal light intensity, which is not usually addressed in the botanical biofiltration studies. Also, there are three-four effective studies comparing the efficiency of microbial and plant-microbial based biosystems in air treatment applications (e.g. unplanted versus planted column biofilters), which could allow advancing and better understanding of their limits in practice. Therefore, the performance of microbial and plant - assisted biofilters treating multiple gaseous pollutants in air under similar operating conditions has been evaluated in this study and key aspects governing the biofiltration process were depicted for each evaluated option. This involved the investigation of the biofilters’ start-up and acclimatization, their removal efficiency, elimination capacity, carbon dioxide evolvement and the operating conditions influence. The provided information could serve as benchmarks for decision making regarding the implementation of sustainable processes for environmental protection.