Abstract
Industrial wastewater contains some organic and inorganic pollutants that are detrimental to the ecosystem but good for the aquatic environment's energy economy. This was observed in the carbon footprint of this study's microalgal growth paradigm change. The brewing industrial wastewater from Durban, South Africa, was characterized using contemporary techniques for analyte quantification. The brewery wastewater was treated using the microalga Scenedesmus sp., and the physicochemical parameters were monitored and determined using the reference beam Hatch DR 3900 Vis spectrophotometer 7TFT WVGA version 1.01 and the multipurpose metre Aqua Lytic AL 15, while BOD5 was measured using the manometric BOD bottle method. TS, TDS, and TSS were measured using gravimetric techniques. On a dry basis, the average biomass productivity of the microalga Scenedesmus sp. culture broth was 0.457±0.167 gL-1d-1, and the optical density increased from 0.014 to 0.680. This growth response resulted in a 96.82 % decrease in COD, an 81.75 % decrease in BOD5, and a 97.71 % decrease in TDS. Similar to this, TKN (76.22 %), NO3-N (73.95 %), NO2-N (54.05 %), NH3-N (84.21 %), PO43- (75.03 %), and Cl- (91.67 %) all saw nutritional loss during the twenty-nine-day operation. The skewed growth response, which led to high biomass output, validated the synergistic nutrient scavenging and Scenedesmus sp. cell proliferation in corroborative energy storage.
