A novel micro-ferrous dosing strategy for enhancing biological phosphorus removal from municipal wastewater

Ferrous salts have been widely used to enhance phosphorus removal in full-scale wastewater treatment plants, with an average dosage of 0.24–0.35 mM. However, such high dosage inevitably caused serious concerns on operation, potential biological toxicity and excessive sludge production. Thus, this study investigated the effect of micro-dosing of ferrous salt at the level of 0.02 mM on enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) in sequencing batch reactors. Results showed that micro-dosing of ferrous salt enhanced the overall performance, with average COD, TN and TP removal of more than 4.2%, 2.0% and 5.8%, respectively. In addition, the sequencing analysis further revealed that micro-ferrous dosing could significantly improve the diversity and richness of the microbial community (p < 0.05), whereas the regular dosing of ferrous salts (0.25 mM) negatively impacted on the EBPR performance. It was found that the abundances of phosphorus accumulating organisms (PAOs) in R2 (micro-dosing) were nearly 1.5-fold and 2-fold higher than those in R1 (control) and R3 (regular dosing). The contributions of biological and chemical pathways towards the observed phosphorus removal were also determined according to the phosphorus releasing rate. For micro-dosage and regular dosage of ferrous salts, phosphorus removal mainly relied on biological phosphorus removal and chemical phosphorus removal, respectively. It appears from this this study that the micro-ferrous dosing strategy is practically feasible and economically viable for enhanced phosphorus removal from municipal wastewater.