A chemical and ecotoxicological assessment of treatment of wastewater that had been polluted with petroleum products using only Activated Sludge (AS) and four biologically activated sorbents (BASs), consisting of activated sludge plus: coal-based activated carbon (-C1), coconut shell-based activated carbon (-C2), zeolite (-Z), and anthracite (-A) were conducted. The efficiency and robustness of the four wastewater treatment systems were evaluated by calculating the reduced total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) contents and the acute ecotoxicity of the effluents. The chemical analysis showed that the combined treatment systems were very effective for reducing the total petroleum hydrocarbon and readily bioavailable PAH contents. The most efficient systems were the BAS-C1 and -C2, which removed 60-88% and 99.5-99.6% of TPH and PAH, respectively. The activated sludge-only treatment was the least effective for purifying the wastewater. Chemical oxygen demand was reduced by >90% by all carbon-based BASs (BAS-C1, BAS-C2 and BAS-A). Shifts in the relative composition of the individual PAHs were identified in samples taken before and after treatment. Algal and bacterial bioassays showed that the toxicities of effluents following treatment by all four systems (except AS for algae) were reduced by more than 80% and 90%, respectively. However, crustacean tests indicated that the carbon-based BASs reduced the toxicity [V tox₍₅₀₎] only by 19-67%. Our results indicated that the combination of sorption and biodegradation processes have great potential in the treatment of petroleum products polluted wastewater and is less sensitive for inhibitors of the biological process than treatments in which activated sludge alone is used. The assessment of chemical and ecotoxicological endpoints provided valuable information, but contrasting results for one of the assays indicates that further analysis on the capacity of the different treatment systems is warranted.

The use of three inorganic materials as potential immobilizers of metals in soils has been studied by monitoring metal availability by EDTA extraction, the Simple Bioaccessibility Extraction Test (SBET) and extraction with a mixture of organic acids (OA). The SBET test was the most suitable for risk assessment in soils of recreational areas. The materials were a 4A-type zeolite, tri-calcium phosphate and 'slovakite', a synthetic sorbent developed for remediation of metal-polluted soils. Adsorption/desorption experiments of metals by the isolated materials showed that all materials caused a strong retention of metals from solutions, with negligible release by dilution. When added to soils of three parks, zeolite and, to a much lesser extent, slovakite caused some increase in soil pH. Despite this increase of pH, zeolite is often the least effective amendment for decreasing metal availability estimated by any method, and even sometimes seems to cause some increase, as well as an increase of soil electrical conductivity. In contrast, slovakite causes a decrease of available metals as estimated by EDTA and SBET, but by SBET the effect seems to be steadily reduced after the first samplings, so that after 300 days the metals extracted by this method are very similar to the data for the blanks. Despite the differences in pseudo-total metal contents, few differences are noticeable among parks. In general, these amendments are scarcely efficient in the case of neutral urban soils like those studied here. Other techniques are needed for controlling and, eventually, decreasing metal pollution hazard in soils of recreational areas.

In this study possibilities for application of natural aluminosilicates, zeolites in the wastewater treatement has been investigated. Under the laboratory conditions the pilot experimental a column filled with aluminosilicates was established. Technological characteristics of the system were estimated by wastewater flow monitoring and calculation of Darcy filtration coefficient.