Microbial Treatment for Removing Synthetic Dyes from Industrial Effluents

Industrial effluent is one of the main causes of environmental pollution. Synthetic azo dyes are widely used in different industries like food, paper, or textile industry. In textile industry, unbound synthetic dyes are released through effluent, which shows awfully sharp effect on the health of different organisms including humans and the entire ecosystem. Though coloured textile industrial effluent has adverse effect on all types of biological network, it has direct effect on water ecosystem because of the general industrial sewage released in nearby water bodies. However, there are different types of physical and chemical waste treatment methods, but those consume huge amount of capital and energy. Microbial processing of waste effluent has capability to trim down drawbacks of chemical methods. In addition, microbial remediation is also environment-friendly and cost-effective. Microorganisms can adapt under any adverse condition due to a huge diversity of enzymes. There are only a few enzymes responsible for dye degradation. Other than that, some common metabolic enzymes may function specially in decolourisation process as well. All these enzymes may be used as beneficial substitute to chemical process. Microbial enzymes are easy to harvest through simple downstream processing and may be easily mobilised. Recent research is going on production of nanoparticle-enzyme conjugate for more efficient remediation of industrial wastes. Until now this research is under laboratory scale, and industrialisation is challenging as well. This chapter deals with detailed information on adverse effect of synthetic dyes, possible microbial process, and future opportunity.