ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Microbiological Chemistry and Geomicrobiology
This article is part of the Research TopicMicrobial Ecological and Biogeochemical Processes in the Soil-Vadose Zone-Groundwater Habitats, Volume IIIView all 8 articles
Ultra-high temperature bacterial agents enhance heavy metal passivation and antibiotic degradation in compost
Provisionally accepted
- 1Jilin University, Changchun, China
- 2Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Harbin, China
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The co-contamination of heavy metals and antibiotics in livestock manure presents a significant environmental challenge. This study developed an integrated ultra-high-temperature (UHT) composting process to address this issue. Through an L9(34) orthogonal experiment, we optimized key parameters and identified 60% moisture content, 25:1 carbon-to-nitrogen (C/N) ratio, and 10% (w/w) activated carbon addition as the optimal combination, with activated carbon being the most influential factor. In pilot-scale validation, bioaugmentation with a specialized UHT microbial consortium (UHTMC) at 1.0% dosage achieved a peak temperature of 84.3 ℃, maintaining temperatures above 70 ℃ for 15 days and above 50 ℃ for 28 days, which significantly surpassed the control. This enhanced thermophilic profile drove superior co-removal performance: 56.0% copper (Cu) and 57.3% zinc (Zn) passivation rates, representing improvements of 11.3 and 11.1 percentage points over the control, respectively, and near-complete degradation (> 99.4%) of tetracycline (TC), oxytetracycline (OTC), and chlortetracycline (CTC). This work demonstrates that bioaugmented UHT composting synergistically enhances microbial activity, effectively passivates heavy metals, and completely degrades antibiotics, providing an efficient resource-oriented strategy for treating co-contaminated solid waste.
Keywords: bioaugmentation, Co-contamination, Synergistic mechanism, Livestockmanure, resource recovery
Received: 19 Sep 2025; Accepted: 03 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chi, Zhang, Li and Li. 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: Huai Li, lihuai@iga.ac.cn
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