Remediation of explosive-polluted soil in slurry phase by aerobic biostimulation

There is a great volume of polluted soil by 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT) manufacturing wastewater containing dozen of nitrocompounds in China. In this study, biostimulation was used for remediating the explosive-polluted soil in aerobic bioslurry by monitoring the removal of total organic carbon (TOC). The results showed that the pulp density had almost no effect on TOC removal; whereas the acetone addition evidently improved remediation efficiency of the polluted soil by intrinsic microorganism, and the TOC removal increased from 25% to 38.4% when dose of acetone increased from 0% to 4% (v/v). The maximum TOC removal of 49.1% was achieved through further adjusting pH at 9.0 and temperature at 30 °C. The second order reaction fits well removal dynamics of TOC under the optimum conditions. With the average conditions, liquid phase TOC decreased from 3404 to 3144 mg/L and solid phase TOC dropped from 1022 to 104 mg/L, leading to toxicity decline by 35%; the optimum condition witnessed 48.9% of TOC removal from 4500 to 2300 mg/L in liquid phase, causing toxicity drop by 62%.