Evaluating the impact of sulfamethoxazole on hydrogen production during dark anaerobic sludge fermentation

Highlight

● SMX promotes hydrogen production from dark anaerobic sludge fermentation.

● SMX significantly enhances the hydrolysis and acidification processes.

● SMX suppresses the methanogenesis process in order to reduce hydrogen consumption.

● SMX enhances the relative abundance of hydrogen-VFAs producers.

● SMX brings possible environmental risks due to the enrichment of ARGs.

Abstract

The impact of antibiotics on the environmental protection and sludge treatment fields has been widely studied. The recovery of hydrogen from waste activated sludge (WAS) has become an issue of great interest. Nevertheless, few studies have focused on the impact of antibiotics present in WAS on hydrogen production during dark anaerobic fermentation. To explore the mechanisms, sulfamethoxazole (SMX) was chosen as a representative antibiotic to evaluate how SMX influenced hydrogen production during dark anaerobic fermentation of WAS. The results demonstrated SMX promoted hydrogen production. With increasing additions of SMX from 0 to 500 mg/kg TSS, the cumulative hydrogen production elevated from 8.07 ± 0.37 to 11.89 ± 0.19 mL/g VSS. A modified Gompertz model further verified that both the maximum potential of hydrogen production (P_m) and the maximum rate of hydrogen production (R_m) were promoted. SMX did not affected sludge solubilization, but promoted hydrolysis and acidification processes to produce more hydrogen. Moreover, the methanogenesis process was inhibited so that hydrogen consumption was reduced. Microbial community analysis further demonstrated that the introduction of SMX improved the abundance of hydrolysis bacteria and hydrogen-volatile fatty acids (VFAs) producers. SMX synergistically influenced hydrolysis, acidification and acetogenesis to facilitate the hydrogen production.

Keywords

Sulfamethoxazole / Hydrogen production / Dark anaerobic fermentation / Waste activated sludge

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CRediT authorship contribution statement

Tingting Zhu: Investigation, Methodology, Data curation, Writing-original draft, Writing-review & editing. Zhongxian Su: Investigation, Methodology, Data curation, Software. Wenxia Lai: Investigation, Methodology. Jiazeng Ding: Investigation, Formal analysis. Yufen Wang: Investigation, Methodology. Yingxin Zhao: Writing-review & editing, Funding acquisition. Yiwen Liu: Conceptualization, Resources, Writing-review & editing, Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFE0106400). Authors are grateful to the research collaboration.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-023-1607-2 and is accessible for authorized users.

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