Bio-Augmentation: Adding Bacteria To Wastewater Treatment Plants

Novozymes is the world’s largest industrial biotech company. The largest segment of the company deals with enzyme products, and they innovate products and develop applications in a variety of industries including first and second generation biofuels, bio-agriculture, detergents, and wastewater applications.

Matt Livingston, Global marketing Manager of Wastewater Solutions with Novozymes, told Water Online Radio in an interview that most of Novozymes’ microorganism products are for bio-augmentation, which is adding bacteria to wastewater treatment plants. In order to do this, his company really needs to understand how that plant is operating so that when the product is applied, it’s going to work the way it was intended to. Livingston says that his product help stabilize performance, which is especially helpful in an industry where there is a lot of variability in the influent. “All of our products start with microorganisms that are found in nature. We isolate them in nature, take them back to our facilities, characterize them, isolate, and grow them and either harvest the enzymes for use in some applications, or harvest the microorganism and use that in some applications.”

Click the radio player below to hear the full interview, and to learn more about Novozymes.