Abstract:
Persistent toxic substances including persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals
have been released in high quantities in surface waters by industrial activities. Their presence in
environmental compartments is causing harmful effects both on the environment and human health.
It was shown that their removal from wastewaters using conventional methods and adsorbents is not
always a sustainable process. In this circumstance, the use of microorganisms for pollutants uptake
can be seen as being an environmentally-friendly and cost-effective strategy for the treatment of
industrial effluents. However, in spite of their confirmed potential in the remediation of persistent
pollutants, microorganisms are not yet applied at industrial scale. Thus, the current paper aims
to synthesize and analyze the available data from literature to support the upscaling of microbialbased
biosorption and bioaccumulation processes. The industrial sources of persistent pollutants,
the microbial mechanisms for pollutant uptake and the significant results revealed so far in the
scientific literature are identified and covered in this review. Moreover, the influence of different
parameters affecting the performance of the discussed systems and also very important in designing
of treatment processes are highly considered. The analysis performed in the paper offers an important
perspective in making decisions for scaling-up and efficient operation, from the life cycle assessment
point of view of wastewater microbial bioremediation. This is significant since the sustainability of
the microbial-based remediation processes through standardized methodologies such as life cycle
analysis (LCA), hasn’t been analyzed yet in the scientific literature.
