Tween 80 surfactant-enhanced bioremediation: toward a solution to the soil contamination by hydrophobic organic compounds

Abstract

The occurrence of hydrophobic organic compounds (HOCs) in the soil has become a highly significant environmental issue. This problem has been exacerbated by the strong sorption of HOCs to the soils, which makes them unavailable for most remediation processes. More and more works show that surfactant-enhanced biological technologies offer a great potential to clear up HOCs-contaminated soils. This article is a critical review of HOCs removal from soils using Tween 80 (one of the mostly used nonionic surfactants) aided biological remediation technologies. The review begins with a discussion of the fundamentals of Tween 80-enhanced desorption of HOCs from contaminated soils, with special emphasis on the biotoxicity of Tween 80. Successful results obtained by Tween 80-enhanced microbial degradation and phytoremediation are documented and discussed in section 3 and section 4, respectively. Results show Tween 80-enhanced biotechnologies are promising for treating HOCs-contaminated soils. However, considering the fact that most of these scientific studies have only been conducted at the laboratory-scale, many improvements are required before these technologies can be scaled up to the full-scale level. Moreover, further research on mechanisms related to the interaction of Tween 80 with degrading microorganisms and the plants is in high demand.

Keywords:

• Soil remediation
• biological technologies
• organic pollutants
• surfactant
• biodegradation
• phytoremediation

Disclosure statement

This study was financially supported by the Program for the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51278176, 51378190, 51408206, 51579098, 51521006), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-13–0186), the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT-13R17), the International S&T Cooperation Program of China (2015DFG92750) and the Hunan Provincial Innovation Foundation for Postgraduate (CX2016B132). The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This study was financially supported by the Program for the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51278176, 51378190, 51408206, 51579098, 51521006), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-13–0186), the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT-13R17), the International S&T Cooperation Program of China (2015DFG92750) and the Hunan Provincial Innovation Foundation for Postgraduate (CX2016B132).