Toluene Bioremediation by Using Geotextile-Layered Permeable Reactive Barriers (PRBs)

Sources of contamination in a subsurface environment are petrol, diesel fuel, gasoline at oil refineries, underground storage tanks, transmission pipelines, and different industries. The permeable reactive barrier (PRB) is promising technology to remediate groundwater in-situ. In this study, synthetic samples containing toluene treated three reactor columns by biological processes. PRB-1 consisted sand gravel as media, microbial inoculum (bioaugmentation—BA), nutrients (biostimulation—BS); PRB-2 inoculum, nutrients, 12 layers nonwoven geotextile fabrics; PRB-3 only media (natural attenuation—NA). This study was conducted assess the impact fabric filter, bioaugmentation, biostimulation on degradation efficiency. After 167 days treatment, biodegradation efficiencies varied between 88.2% 93.8% for PRB 1, 98.0% 99.3% 2, 14.2% 68.6% 3. effluent concentrations were less than guideline value (0.7 mg/L) World Health Organization. Reaction rate data fitted with first-order kinetic reaction model. showed that removal efficiency layered combined BA BS process significantly higher compared other processes tested. lab-scale introduced new configuration suitable remediation sites contaminated toluene.