One fascinating thing about wastewater treatment is that while plants are filled with big tanks, motors, pumps, mixers, blowers and valves, the real work gets done at the microscopic level — by the bacteria that consume the waste.In recent years, a new family of microorganisms has come into focus: anammox bacteria, which can turn ammonium into nitrogen gas anaerobically. The obvious advantage over conventional treatment is that anammox bacteria require far less aeration and thus far less energy to remove nitrogen from the wastewater.So theoretically, that’s great. The question is how to make the anammox bacteria function most efficiently in
