Overgrowth control of potentially hazardous bacteria during storage of ozone treated wastewater through natural competition

Improving the chemical and biological quality of treated wastewater is particularly important in world regions under water stress. In these regions, reutilization of wastewater is seen as an alternative to reduce water demand, particularly for agriculture irrigation. In a reuse scenario, the treated wastewater must have enough quality to avoid chemical and biological contamination of the receiving environment. Ozonation is among the technologies available to efficiently remove organic micropollutants and disinfect secondary effluents, being implemented in full-scale urban wastewater treatment plants worldwide. However, previous studies demonstrated that storage of ozone treated wastewater promoted the overgrowth of potentially harmful bacteria, putting at risk its reutilization, given for instance the possibility of contaminating the food-chain. Therefore, this study was designed to assess the potential beneficial role of inoculation of ozone treated wastewater with a diverse bacterial community during storage, for the control of the overgrowth of potentially hazardous bacteria, through bacterial competition. To achieve this goal, ozone treated wastewater (TWW) was diluted with river water (RW) in the same proportion, and the resulting bacterial community (RW+TWW) was compared to that of undiluted TWW over 7 days storage. As hypothesized, in contrast to TWW, where dominance of Beta- and Gammaproteobacteria, namely Pseudomonas spp. and Acinetobacter spp., was observed upon storage for 7 days, the bacterial communities of the diluted samples (RW+TWW) were diverse, resembling those of RW. Moreover, given the high abundance of antibiotic resistance genes in RW, the concentration of these genes in RW+TWW did not differ from that of the non-ozonated controls (WW, RW and RW+WW) over the storage period. These results highlight the necessity of finding a suitable pristine diverse bacterial community to be used in the future to compete with bacteria surviving ozonation, to prevent reactivation of undesirable bacteria during storage of treated wastewater.

Automated summary

Improving the quality of treated wastewater is crucial in water-stressed regions. This study explores the potential of using a diverse bacterial community to prevent the overgrowth of harmful bacteria in ozone treated wastewater during storage. The results show that the diluted samples with the added bacterial community had diverse bacterial composition and did not show an increase in antibiotic resistance genes.