Extracting Compositional Blocks of Alginate-Like Extracellular Polymers (ALE) from Conventional Activated Sludge (CAS)

As a highly added value material, alginate-like extracellular polymers (ALE) can be extracted from extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) from aerobic granular sludge (AGS). In fact, conventional activated sludge (CAS) also contains a certain amount of ALE. As CAS is widely used everywhere, waste activated sludge (WAS) from CAS is huge in its absolute amount. Although the ALE property of CAS was identified not so good as that from AGS, the mechanisms remains unclear. For this reason, it is necessary to unravel the chemically compositional blocks of ALE. Referring to natural alginate, ALE can be separated into three compositional blocks: GGL, GML and MML (like units containing guluronate or mannuronate), associated with other compositions including protein (PN), polysaccharide (PS), phosphorus (P), humic acid (HA). With real WAS from CAS, ALE was extracted and three blocks were separated: GGL = 54 %, GML = 42 % and MML = 4 % in weight, which is similar to the previous study. Moreover, the GGL blocks in CAS were obviously lower than AGS, down to by 1/3-1/2. And the GML and MML blocks in CAS were much higher than AGS, by more than 1/2. Different compositional blocks of ALE in AGS and CAS should be the reason forming different properties in applications. For this reason, a further study will be initiated to dispense/reorganize three blocks of ALE from CAS for expanding its potential applications, based on the compositional blocks of ALE from AGS.