Development of an Odor Management Plan for South Dakota

Odor from livestock operations is often a nuisance to the neighborhood stakeholders and is one of the major environmental and societal issues associated with livestock industries. An odor management plan is not a requirement during the state permitting process of any livestock operation in South Dakota, but may be required to varying degrees for county level approval. Some neighboring states have developed odor management planning guides or templates which help address odor issues. Adoption of an odor management plan in SD can help address concerns of odor for the continuously expanding livestock industry in this state. Hence, an odor management plan template has been developed in this study to help proactively minimize odor conflicts among livestock operations and neighborhood communities. This template was guided by the existing guides or tools from other states, along with the engagement of different interest groups in SD. Some case studies were analyzed to relate hydrogen sulfide gas with odor annoyances, which could play a role in assessing odor annoyances and in odor management. Our template includes scientific tools to assess odor impacts of an operation. However, voluntary adoption of this OMP template will give producers from SD and surrounding regions an advantage of explaining their positive attitude of reducing odors generated by their operation towards the community

Removal of Micropollutants from Wastewater in Aerobic Granular Sludge and Activated Sludge Systems

The presence of organic substances in the aquatic environment, such as pharmaceutically active compounds, antibiotics, and personal care products, has become a worldwide issue of increasing environmental concern. As they are present at nano- to microgram per liter concentrations, they are defined as organic micropollutants (OMPs). Understanding the removal of micropollutants mediated by biological processes in wastewater treatment plants is the key to developing and deploying strategies to efficiently reduce environmental exposure to such contaminants. The biomass configurations (suspended growth systems or biofilms) can affect the removal of OMPs, and the underpinning mechanisms need to be substantiated. Aerobic granular sludge (AGS) is a form of free-floating biofilm technology for the simultaneous removal of organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in a single process step. The features of AGS make this technology very attractive for the removal of OMPs, but an in-depth understanding of the fate of OMPs in such systems under different operational conditions is still required.The present work investigated the removal mechanisms of OMPs in biological treatment processes with a focus on AGS. Removal performances were evaluated by measuring the presence of OMPs in the water phase at both full-scale treatment plants and laboratory-scale reactors. The kinetics of transformation and sorption behavior were assessed in batch experiments with different biomass types. The microbial communities and antimicrobial resistance genes of the activated sludge and granular sludge systems were compared. The spatial distributions of a few pharmaceuticals inside the biological matrix of AGS were imaged and analyzed together with the endogenous biofilm molecules by secondary ion mass spectrometry.A higher transformation capacity for most of the investigated OMPs was observed for the activated sludge compared to the granular sludge system, both at the full-scale treatment plant and in the batch experiments. Despite the differences in microbial composition and diversity, the two systems shared similar antimicrobial resistance gene profiles. Micropollutant exposure to the biomass or mass transfer limitations in the dense matrix of AGS likely played an important role and could explain the observed differences in OMP removal. Oxic conditions seemed to support the microbial transformation of several micropollutants with a faster and/or comparable rate compared to anoxic conditions. Sorption of OMPs to the biomass was observed to be an important removal mechanism for a few compounds. Partitioning of the pharmaceuticals to AGS occurred quickly and increased over time for most pharmaceuticals, suggesting that the compounds can penetrate the deeper biofilm matrix. This observation was also confirmed by the chemical analysis of the biofilm matrix of AGS. The spatial distributions of the pharmaceuticals inside the biological matrix of AGS revealed that the interactions between the OMPs and the biomass happen at specific receptor sites distributed across the biofilm