SITE HISTORY - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

s CENET Evaluation f Introducdoo EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This summary provides a brief overview of the information collected during the CENET evaluation of the JFT-11'M bioremediation process for Bio Converters, Inc. The initial goals of the evaluation were to gauge the efficacy of the process on diesel, trichloroethylene (TCE), and DDT contaminated soil and to study the working mechanism of the microbial biotransformation of the process. One particular interest was finding the energy source used by the microbes under reduced oxygen conditions. However, many of the results obtained were inconclusive and some answers were unobtainable, primarily due to limited funding and associated time constraints. The two largest difficulties with the evaluation were heterogeneity of samples and the presence of remediating bacteria in the control reactors. Although the soil used in the tests was carefully spiked and mixed with the contaminants, test results did not reach the level of concentration that had been applied and there were always large differences between adjacent samples in the same reactor (i.e. non-detect, then in thousands), making tracking concentration changes over time difficult. Also, though the soil used had been autoclaved, the control reactors were found to contain unexpectedly large populations of both general and selective bacteria prior to treatment. The high populations of substrate specific organisms were atypical, because adaptation of native soil bacteria into specific contaminant degrading microbes generally requires a significant length of time, often years,. Unfortunately, the presence of these microbes in the control reactors complicated the evaluation and made it impossible to use of the results of control reactor tests to represent handling, evapurativu, and/or incidental contaminant losses. Since all of the test reactors were prepared in the same room, it is possible that JFT-1Tm somehow contaminated the control soil as the soils were being prepared and packed into the reactors. If this cross contamination did occur, then the controls were also JFT-1 TU reactors. Although many of the results were, as previously mentioned, inconclusive or unobtainable, some correlations were found which support the representations of the process and previous project findings provided by BCI at the beginning of the evaluation. The evaluation did find substrate specific, selective microbial activity for all contaminants tested, in both contaminated soil and water. This microbial activity proceeded at the speed of aerobic metabolism 1-3