AccScience Publishing / AJWEP / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/AJWEP025240198
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Treatment of antibiotic fermentation effluents using charcoal adsorption

Salah Mohammed Aleid1* ,  Siddig H. Hamad1 ,  Sam Al-Dalali2,3*
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1 Department of Food and Nutrition Sciences, College of Agriculture and Food Sciences, King Faisal University, Al Ahsa, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia
2 School of Food and Health, Guilin Tourism University, Guilin, Guangxi, China
3 Department of Food Science and Technology, Faculty of Agriculture and Food Science, Ibb University, Ibb, Yemen
AJWEP, 025240198 https://doi.org/10.36922/AJWEP025240198
Received: 15 June 2025 | Revised: 3 August 2025 | Accepted: 11 August 2025 | Published online: 28 August 2025
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

Activated carbon (AC) is widely used as an adsorbent in multiple sectors, including the pharmaceutical, chemical, beverage, and food industries. This study investigates the removal of organic materials from antibiotic fermentation effluents using powdered AC at various temperatures. Pristinamycin was synthesized by cultivating Streptomyces pristinaespiralis with date syrup as a glucose substitute. The fermentation effluent was treated with activated charcoal to reduce biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD). Optimal removal was achieved with 30 mg/L of activated charcoal at 25°C. Under these conditions, COD decreased by approximately 52%, and 5-day BOD decreased by approximately 9.1% compared to the untreated effluent. Increasing the AC dose enhanced the efficiency of COD removal. Based on these findings, AC adsorption of antibiotic pristinamycin from wastewater appears to be a viable treatment option.

Keywords
Antibiotic fermentation
Biochemical oxygen demand
Chemical oxygen demand
Adsorption
Charcoal
Pristinamycin
Funding
This study was funded by the Date Palm Research Center of Excellence, King Faisal University.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests, and this manuscript has not been submitted to any other journal in parallel or published previously.
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Asian Journal of Water, Environment and Pollution, Electronic ISSN: 1875-8568 Print ISSN: 0972-9860, Published by AccScience Publishing
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