SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project addresses the critical societal need to remediate widespread problems of toxic organic pollutants in soils, sediments and groundwater. The technology results in a significantly improved ability to destroy organic environmental contaminants by reducing treatment time and costs at commercial scales using novel bacterial strains. These strains have a demonstrated ability to rapidly degrade a variety of important, recalcitrant organic pollutants including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PaHs) and dioxins. This project will assess the costs and efficacy of the large-scale implementation of this technology that includes the incubation of the contaminated material at elevated temperatures (60¢ªC/150¢ªF) to enhance degradation. This enables environmental goals to be met on many sites whose cleanup is currently limited by the high costs of remediation. The commercial impact is significant and makes possible the re-development of many billions of dollars of real estate in these categories to return these properties to productive and appropriate use. Additional aspects of the technology are applicable to emerging pollutants such as 1,4-dioxane in groundwater and greatly expand the options available to environmental engineers and landowners for cleaning up long-lived pollutants. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to develop two novel modes of destroying organic contaminants of concern that reduce remediation costs and improve outcomes. The project improves on prior approaches to bioremediation by using heat-tolerant bacteria for faster rates of chemical destruction for a broad range of pollutants. Objectives include the evaluation of the efficacy and costs to treat large amounts (5-10 tons) of material with whole bacteria as basis to assess the commercial application of the technology. This involves several components, including the optimization of the large-scale cell production protocols to produce the bacteria. In conjunction with environmental engineering firms, the project also will develop cost-effective approaches to maintaining the appropriate temperature, moisture and oxygen conditions for optimal cell growth during large-scale treatments. Variations in incubation conditions and flocculent additions will be used to determine the lowest pollutant levels that can be attained. Finally, a new approach using cell extracts instead of live cells will be evaluated for both soils and sediments as well as for soluble pollutants like 1,4-dioxane. These approaches will provide critical data on remediation costs at commercial scale and also evaluate new approaches to emerging groundwater pollutants that are difficult to remediate with current technology.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is addressing the critical societal need to remediate toxic organic pollutants in soils and sediments. The proposed technology would enable environmental goals to be met on many contaminated sites whose remediation is currently limited by high costs. The technology would contribute to the re-development of many billions of dollars in real estate by returning properties to productive and appropriate use. The hybrid bacterial augmentation and thermal technology provides a model for additional systems with other bacteria uniquely suited to applications in emerging contaminants and water treatment. This project proposes to commercialize a bacterial treatment for the degradation of organic contaminants of concern in environmental matrices such as soils and sediments. The thermally-enhanced bioaugmentation technology evaluated in Phase I is based on a novel bacterial strain and its enzymes that function at elevated temperatures and are capable of degrading a variety of ring based, organic pollutants, including chlorinated forms difficult to remediate. Pilot tests on soils contaminated with Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH) demonstrated degradation for both TPH and for the heavier poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PaHs) on the EPA's list of priority pollutants. Phase II goals are to expand these initial studies to the full commercial scale of 100s to 1000s of tons of soil by working with established environmental engineering firms with extensive experience in thermal treatments of large volumes. To fully commercialize this new technology, the production capacity for the biological agents also will be scaled up by over an order of magnitude. The technology will be applied both ex-situ and in-situ as the process evolves. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.