A review of anaerobic treatment of saline wastewater

Large volumes of saline (> 2% w/v NaCl) wastewaters are discharged from many industries; e.g. seafood processing, textile dyeing, oil and gas production, tanneries and drinking water treatment processes. Although anaerobic treatment would be the most cost-effective and sustainable technology for the treatment of many of these saline wastewaters, the salinity is considered to be inhibitory to anaerobic biological treatment processes. The recent applications of salt-tolerant cultures for the treatment of wastewaters from seafood processing and ion-exchange processes suggest that biological systems can be used to treat salty wastewaters. Additionally, organisms capable of anaerobic degradation of contaminants in saline solutions have been observed in marine sediments and have been characterized during the last two decades. This manuscript provides a review of the recent research on anaerobic treatment of saline wastewater and bacterial consortia capable of the anaerobic degradation of pollutants in saline solutions, documenting that the biological treatment of saline wastewaters is promising.