ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Chem.
Sec. Green and Sustainable Chemistry
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fchem.2025.1597470
Effective removal of naphthalene from water using bacteria and bacteria-load carrier materials
Provisionally accepted
- 1China DK Comprehensive Engineering Investigation and Design Research Institute Co., Ltd., Xi'an, China
- 2Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi'an, China
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The volatilization of naphthalene unavoidably poses significant risks to health, the environment, and safety. Traditional remediation approaches have been criticized for their inefficiency in removing naphthalene and transforming its toxicity. This study proposed a bacteria-loaded carrier material and evaluated its degradation efficiency compared to that of free bacteria. High concentrations made it more challenging for Microbacterium paraoxydans (ms) to achieve effective degradation of naphthalene. Additionally, the degradation process was not timely, thereby exacerbating the risks associated with the volatilization of naphthalene. Three carrier materials—activated carbon (AC), calcium alginate (CA), and composite gel beads (CO)—were evaluated for their adsorption, biocompatibility, and thermal stability. CO’s adsorption of naphthalene occurred mainly through chemisorption, with π-π conjugation and Ca-π interaction enhancing the adsorption process. The adsorption peaks did not exhibit any shifts after the involvement of bacteria, indicating the best biocompatibility among the carrier materials, despite having the second lowest total weight loss (CA > CO > AC) during the heating process. The salicylic acid pathway and the phthalic acid pathway were involved in the degradation of naphthalene. No signs of naphthalene were seen in the samples from confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM) tests, indicating that ms fully degraded naphthalene after its adsorption. While ms degraded naphthalene on day 4 for 50 mg/L and 100 mg/L concentrations, 31.2 mg/L remained for the 200 mg/L concentration. In contrast, ms-loaded CO degraded most of the naphthalene on day 1, with only 2.8 mg/L remaining from the initial 200 mg/L concentration. This study underscored the relative merits of applying ms-loaded CO to the degradation of naphthalene.
Keywords: Naphthalene1, degradation efficiency2, abiotic loss3, carrier material4, thermal stability5
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 28 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Cheng, Xie, Wang, Xue, Yang, Zhang, Min and Yao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wen-Chieh Cheng, Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi'an, China
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