With the increasing environmental pollution caused by waste polymers, the conversion of polymer components in biomass into valuable products is of great significance for waste management and resource recovery. A two-stage microbial fuel cell (MFC) was used to treat furfural wastewater in this study. The maximum output voltage was 240-250 mV and the power generation time in an operation cycle was 286 h. The degradation efficiency of furfural reached 99-100% (furfural concentration at 300-3000 mg/L) and was slightly reduced to 91% at 7000 mg/L. In addition, the BOD/COD ratio of the furfural wastewater increased from 0.31 to 0.48 after MFC processing. The molecular analysis of the anodic bacterial isolates indicated that the phylogenetic bacterial mixture was dominated by five active anaerobic bacteria with a similarity percentage above 99% for each strain: Burkholderia (B. burdella), Clostridium sensu stricto (Cymbidaceae), Klebsiella (Klebsiella), Ethanoligenens (anaerobic genus), and Acidocella (anaerobic genus); the mixture exhibited good properties to carry out bioelectricity generation in the microbial fuel cell. This indicates that the MFC has effectively degraded furfural for pollutant removal and power generation and is a promising clean method to treat furfural pollution in industry wastewater.
Keywords: biomass polymer conversion; electric energy recovery; furfural wastewater; microbial fuel cell.