Microbial Biosurfactants and Their Implication Toward Wastewater Management

Abstract

Environmental problems associated with water sanitation are gradually on increase by superfluous human activities and also due to developmental issues. Wastewater contains various types of pollutants such as pesticides, heavy metals, dyes, and petrochemicals. This has become a global issue for balanced ecosystem since different types of pollutants are responsible for health hazards, owing to their toxicity and poor biodegradability. The removal of these pollutants as well as their sources from water is one of the biggest challenges for both researcher and community. Recently, methods using microbes and microbial products have been employed for the removal of petrochemicals, heavy metals, and pesticides from the water and soil. These methods have been positively used to treat different wastewater types like sewage, sludge, and industrial effluents. There are other treatment approaches also, such as chemical, physical, and other conventional methods, but some of them are not cost effective and some result in secondary pollutants and therefore unsafe to the environment. In this chapter, we will discuss the effective biological treatment approaches, which is bioremediation using microbial biosurfactants. Biosurfactants are the surface-active biomolecules that have several unique properties such as amphipathic in nature, biodegradable, emulsion forming property, tolerant to extreme conditions, and biological origin. Biosurfactants have a great potential for the removal of complex hydrophobic pollutants and pesticides from wastewater because they can be easily interact with those pollutants by their amphipathic nature. It is an extracellularly produced bio-product, and also considered as microbial secondary metabolite which is being produced in the stationary phase of the growth pattern of microbes. Here we have also briefly discussed the production of biosurfactants.