Bioaugmentation for Dairy Wastewater

Five fungal sp. were isolated from dairy effluent collected from Verka Milk Plant Industrial Area-1, Chandigarh, India in winter and summer season in the year 2014 and identified as Alternaria sp. (D1W& D4S), Fusarium sp. (D3S), Aspergillus sp. (D2W& D5S) by lactophenol cotton blue staining. Aerobic and anaerobic degradation was carried out by inoculating the dairy effluent with the fungal isolates and maintaining the volume at 500mL followed with the addition of D-glucose (4g/L) after every 24 hours for the period of 5 days. During aerobic degradation aeration rate of 4L/min and stirring rate of 10 rpm was maintained. Anaerobic degradation was carried out at stirring rate of 5 rpm without aeration. The various physico-chemical parameters like COD, TDS, EC, salinity and pH were checked after every 24 hours for 5 consecutive days. Under aerobic conditions D1W effectively degraded the effluent by reducing COD upto 90.59 %. Under anaerobic conditions D4S had shown maximum reduction in TDS (83.78 %), COD (83.07 %), EC (80.86 %) and salinity (76.19 %). The present study concluded that Alternaria sp. isolated from different seasons proved to be promising strain for biodegradation of organic compounds present in dairy effluent and can further be exploited for industrial scale applications.