Feeding pollution to bacteria
Tessenderlo Chemie has announced the start of an innovative new project to improve the cleaning of polluted industrial sites using bacteria. The chemicals company will cooperate in the project with Ghent University and independent pollution experts. The work will be carried out on Tessenderlo’s monovinyl chloride factory, which has for many years been affected by severe ground pollution.
The sources of the pollution have now been eliminated, and the project – which has received funding from the EU’s LIFE+ programme – will introduce the bacterium known as Desulfitobacterium dichloroeliminans strain DCA1.
The bacterium can respire in conditions where oxygen is absent by a process known as dehalorespiration. It provides itself with energy by breaking down the chlorine-based compounds causing the pollution, mainly dichloroethane, or DCA. This is the most abundant chlorine pollutant of groundwater on the planet, but the bacterium essentially eats it up and excretes what’s left as harmless compounds.
