Investigating the Temperature Effects on Nutrient Removal in Green Sorption Media

High nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in stormwater runoff, contaminated groundwater, landfill leachate, and domestic and industrial wastewater effluents have negatively impacted the drinking water quality in many regions. The use of filter media, such as tire crumb, sawdust, sand, clay, zeolite, sulfur, limestone, etc., to get better removal efficiencies of nutrients has been the focus in the planning and design of green infrastructure. These material mixes mainly promote the adsorption/absorption and precipitation of orthophosphate in physicochemical process and the transformation of ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate via oxidation and reduction reactions in the microbiological process. However, temperature changes affect nutrient removal efficiencies in both natural and engineered systems. This paper aims to explore the filtration kinetics of selected filter media for nutrient removal at various temperatures to improve their application potential in all weather conditions. Constitutes of concern include ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, total nitrogen, and orthophosphate. Such a kinetics study leads to investigate the capabilities of comparing a natural soil with soil augmentations in regard to removing nutrients under a range of initial concentrations at three different temperatures (i.e., 28°C, 23°C, and 10° C). Significant differences of removal efficiencies associated with these prespecified temperatures were statistically confirmed by ANOVA analyses.