Project title: ELECTRA – Electricity driven Low Energy and Chemical input Technology foR Accelerated bioremediation

Project website: https://www.electra.site

Topic: CE-BIOTEC-04-2018

Type of action: RIA (research & innovation)

Funding Agency: European Union / European Commission

Project duration: 2019. 01. 01 – 2022. 12. 31

Project type: consortial

Project partners: 

ELECTRA is a consortium of European and Chinese partners.

The EC-funded consortium gathers 17 partners from 6 EU countries,1 Associated Country. 1 large Chinese company is part of the EC consortium without claiming any funding from the EC since NSFC finances only fundamental research and does not allow for the inclusion of companies as partners in NSFC projects. This company has a key/essential role in replicating field test experiments from European sites to Chinese sites.

 Summary:

The ELECTRA project is a EU-China RTD joint initiative that will deliver 2 innovative sets of novel electromicrobiology based environmental biotechnologies, facilitating/improving electron transfer during microbial degradation processes. Our approach will accelerate the elimination of several classes of pollutants and mixtures thereof in contaminated wastewater, groundwater, sediment and soil.

The first set of biotechnologies employs bioelectrochemical systems requiring low energyinput and no chemical addition.

The second set comprises biotechnologies, which necessitate no energy input and minimal chemical amendment using electromicrobial concepts.

ELECTRA biotechnologies will build on recent groundbreaking advances in biotechnology to develop them for environmental bioremediation applications and test the 4 most advanced technologies during field trials under various environmentally relevant conditions in both Europe (4 sites with contaminated wastewater, groundwater, soil, and sediment) and China (4 sites: mirroring tests concept) to prove their efficiency and robustness.

The ELECTRA project deliberately addresses the accelerated elimination of compounds representative of hydrocarbons and derivatives, emerging pollutants, metals and nutrients and mixtures thereof in environmentally relevant concentration as a wise and careful approach taking into account the real problem of contaminations by organic and inorganic pollutants as well as nutrients.

The ELECTRA project addresses the accelerated elimination of:

1. Hydrocarbons (TPHs: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and alkanes) and their halogenated derivatives (e.g.chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbons (CAHs), polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs, halogenated aromatics);
2. Metals (Sb, Pb, As, Hg, Cd, Zn);
3. Nutrients (NH4+ and NO3-)
4. Emerging micropollutants: antibiotics (e.g. fluoroquinolones and sulphonamides); flame retardants and endocrine disrupting chemicals (e.g. tetrabromobisphenol A and bisphenol A) and pesticides (e.g. bromoxynil and propiconazole).

The environmental impacts and financial costs associated with ELECTRA’s bioremediation technologies will be estimated from a life cycle and risk perspective to support the decision process in future treatment selections.

LCA will be used to evaluate the efficiency of the remediation technologies and to choose the technology Champions to be tested.

A web-based EDSS (Environmental Decision Support System) will be developed to help support relevant decision makers in selecting the most appropriate treatment option for target applications based on technical, environmental and economic criteria.

The main task of the Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology Research group within BME’s Applied Biotechnology and Food Science Department will be ecotoxicological monitoring of the experiments.

A problem-specific and complex monitoring methodology will be developed and applied by BME to follow changes in the ecotoxicity of contaminated WW, GW, soil and sediment before and after technology applications. The toxicity associated to the contaminated matrixes of the selected sites will be evaluated using a suite of ecotoxicity tests. For each matrix/contaminant, the most suitable ones will be then selected for the evaluation of the toxicity changes at the end of the bioremediation processes. For each matrix, test organisms from at least three trophic levels will be chosen and extrapolation to the complex ecosystem will be carried out.

Acute, chronic toxicity and genotoxic effects will be tested with standardized (based on ISO and OECD standards) or pollutant-specific test methods (e.g. D. magna heartbeat rate test for micropollutants). For the pollutant and matrix specific (WW, GW, soil, sediment) ecotoxicity toolkit BME will select the best combination of the following test organisms: Aliivibrio fischeri (luminescent aquatic bacterium), Bacillus subtilis (soil bacterium), Salmonella typhimurium (in Ames-test), Lemna minor (aquatic plant), Sinapis alba and Triticum aestivum (terrestrial plants), Tetrahymena pyriformis (protozoan), Daphnia magna (water living crustacean), Heterocypris incongruens (sediment living ostracoda), Folsomia candida (soil living insect), Enchytraeus albidus (potworm), etc. Except for aquatic test organisms, most of them can be applied for the testing of both liquid and solid samples.

In case of soils and sediments, both water extracts and whole soil/sediment samples (direct toxicity assessment, DTA) will be tested. DTA draws the attention to the chemically unmeasured or non-measurable, but existing hazardous components.

BME will be involved also in Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) of the different technologies to estimate environmental impacts associated with the application of the technology and in the development of the knowledge base of the multi criteria EDSS.