Florencio C Ballesteros Jr

University of the Philippines System | UPD · Department of Chemical Engineering

Most water management methodologies require comprehensive studies and thus, entail voluminous data, time, and scientific expertise. Sensorial evaluation techniques were thus, considered as these represent methods with minimal cost and can involve the local communities. This study applied the Sarno River Visual Assessment Protocol (SRVAP), a modifie...

Abstract In search of new options to achieve removal of pharmaceuticals in the environment, combined ultrasound and ozonation has become a focus of intense investigation for wastewater treatment. In this study, three pharmaceuticals were selected as model compounds for degradation experiments: diclofenac (DCF), sulfamethoxazole (SMX) and carbamazep...

We report concentrations, enrichment factors, and hazard indicators of 11 metals (Ag, As, Cd, Co, Cu, Fe, In, Mn, Ni, Pb, and Zn) in soil and dust surface matrices from formal and informal electronic waste (e-waste) recycling sites around Metro Manila, the Philippines, referring to soil guidelines and previous data from various e-waste recycling si...

The links between built form and environmental health are, as yet, inadequately understood. Risk is a formless and ambiguous phenomenon tightly embedded in the myriad pattern of land uses that generate it. Our research, which is founded on a contextualist notion of policy design, demonstrates the potential of innovative land use policy instruments...

The transition from considering e-waste as a liability to recognizing it as a valuable resource is pivotal for environmental sustainability. Electronic waste is growing at an alarming rate, and the extraction and recovery of precious metals offer an economically and ecologically sound solution. Furthermore, with the global shift towards electrifica...

Radon concentration in various workplaces, including tourist caves, remains higher than the recommended action level by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, which may pose a significant health risk. However, there has been no endeavor to investigate radon concentration in Philippine caves. This work investigated radon concentrat...

This study delves into the microbial community complexity and its role in self-forming dynamic membrane (SFDM) systems, designed to remove nutrients and pollutants from wastewater, by means of the analysis of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) data. In these systems, microorganisms are naturally incorporated into the SFDM layer, which acts as a biolo...

A novel approach for the treatment of VOCs (by using toluene used as a model compound) and the simultaneous conversion of carbon dioxide into valuable biomass has been investigated by using a combination of an activated sludge moving bed bioreactor (MBBR) and an algal photo-bioreactor (PBR). The first unit (MBBR, R1) promoted toluene removal up to...

Volatile organic compounds’ (VOCs) emissions in the atmosphere are among the gases that can affect the health of the exposed population and can be harmful to the environment. One possible solution to control the VOCs’ emissions is the application of algal-based technology like photobioreactor (PBR). In this paper, advanced algal–bacterial PBR was a...

The study has investigated the use of an Algae-Sludge Membrane Bioreactor (AS-MBR) for wastewater treatment. Its performance, in terms of pollutant removal and membrane fouling mitigation, was compared to that of a previously reported conventional MBR. Results showed that it has a COD removal efficiency that is only slightly higher than that in the...

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies are being developed to address the increasing CO 2 emissions, mitigating the global warming and climate change. In this context, chemical precipitation has been advanced to enhance the performance, energy-efficiency and profitability of CCUS. In this review, we first present the fundament...

An advanced concept of aerobic membrane bioreactors (MBRs) for highly efficient wastewater treatment has been disclosed by introduction of an electro and encapsulated self-forming dynamic biomembrane (e-ESFDM). The biological filtering membrane is intercalated between two woven polyester fabrics as supports that assist the formation and protect the...

Almost all aspects of society from food security to disease control and prevention have benefited from pharmaceutical and personal care products, yet these products are a major source of contamination that ends up in wastewater and ecosystems. This issue has been sharply accentuated during the coronavirus disease pandemic 2019 (COVID-19) due to the...

Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) for wastewater treatment are being extensively studied and optimized to achieve the following: (a) higher pollutant removal efficiency, (b) better fouling control, (c) lower energy consumption, or (d) higher energy production in MBRs. These efforts have led to the development of a number of alternative advanced configura...

Integration of the electrochemical and membrane filtration processes in water and wastewater treatments systems has been shown to enhance the removal of conventional and nonconventional pollutants from wastewater. In addition, this integration reduces the rate of membrane fouling, rejects pollutants more effectively, and improves clean water genera...

Pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) recently defined as emerging pollutants that widespread in surface water all around the world. This study investigated the distribution, and ecological risk of PPCPs in urban rivers of Hanoi, Vietnam, and Metro Manila, the Philippines. Of the 56 investigated PPCPs, 48 and 33 compounds were detected...

There is a global need for residual waste management to prevent environmental and health hazards and reduce its volume for disposal to sanitary landfills. A waste-to-energy (WtE) facility can provide solutions by converting energy from waste to generate electricity. In this study, a method of selecting the most appropriate WtE technology for residu...

The concept of a novel living encapsulated self-forming dynamic bio-membranes (ESFDM) for an innovative wastewater treatment in membrane bioreactor (MBR) is presented in the current study. The active filtering membrane is encapsulated, and thus stabilized, between two support meshes with pore in micrometer size. The combination of activated sludge,...

Waste disposal is an important issue that needs to be addressed, not only for health and environmental reasons but also for its social and economic impacts. Three important waste streams that contribute to the growing amount of wastes generated come from medical, industrial, and electronic residual wastes. These residual wastes are usually just bei...

Sanitary landfill is considered as a final repository of residual wastes. However, there is a need for volume reduction to increase the lifespan of the landfill and to stabilize these wastes to prevent environmental and health hazards. A possible option to achieve these objectives is a waste-to-energy (WtE) facility that can significantly reduce re...

This review paper aims to identify the main sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and highlights several technologies developed to capture CO2 in this milieu. CO2 is emitted in all the operational units of conventional WWTPs, and even after the disposal of treated effluents and sludges. CO2 emissions fro...

Green and sustainable strategies aim for the development of manufacturing processes that maximize the use of resources, instigating the semiconductor industry to adopt zero-liquid discharge policies. Complexity and variations in semiconductor wastewater effluents open an opportunity for resource recovery. One such opportunity is the potential recov...

The effect of addition of algae to activated sludge as active biomass in membrane bioreactors (MBRs) and electro-MBRs (e-MBRs) for wastewater remediation was examined in this study. The performances of Algae-Activated Sludge Membrane Bioreactor (AAS-MBR) and electro Algae-Activated Sludge Membrane Bioreactor (e-AAS-MBR) were compared to those obser...

Odours emissions from various facilities such as wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), are becoming one of the main issues to face down for the plant operators to avoid complaints and potential impact, especially for the plants located nearby to the residential areas. The need to implement odour control strategies, for instance by using treatment te...

There a lot of review papers addressing specific COVID-19 research sectors, then devoted to specialists. This review provides an in-depth summary of the available information about SARS-CoV-2 and the corresponding disease (also known as COVID-19), with a multi-disciplinary approach. After the paper introduction, the first section treats the virolog...

Considerable attention has been recently given to possible transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via water media. This review addresses this issue and examines the fate of coronaviruses (CoVs) in water systems, with particular attention to the recently available information on the novel SARS-CoV-2. The methods for the determination of viable virus particle an...

Photocatalysis is a well-known low-cost approach for the degradation of pollutants utilizing the energy of light. However, the most studied photocatalysts are characterized by wide bandgaps (TiO2, ZnO, Cu2O), restricting the solar light utilization to UV. In this study, a magnetic composite catalyst comprised of Fe3O4@SiO2 core-shell nanoparticles,...

Instrumental odour monitoring systems (IOMS) are intelligent electronic sensing tools for which the primary application is the generation of odour metrics that are indicators of odour as perceived by human observers. The quality of the odour sensor signal, the mathematical treatment of the acquired data, and the validation of the correlation of the...

This paper presents an updated and comprehensive review on the different methods used for detection and quantification of viruses in wastewater treatment systems. The analysis of viability of viruses in wastewater and sludge is another thrust of this review. Recent studies have mostly focused on determining the abundance and diversity of viruses in...

Ultrasonication with water recirculation slightly enhanced the removal of toluene compared to water recirculation alone due to conjunction of pyrolysis and hydroxyl radical oxidation with absorption. On the other hand, the addition of ozone with ultrasonication decreased the removal efficiency due to scavenging of hydroxyl radicals. The reaction ra...

Pharmaceutical active compounds (PhACs) have been detected at significant concentrations in various natural and artificial aquatic environments. In this study, electro membrane bioreactor (eMBR) technology was used to treat simulated municipal wastewater containing widely-used pharmaceuticals namely amoxicillin (AMX), diclofenac (DCF) and carbamaze...

Unwanted odour emissions are considered air pollutants that may cause detrimental impacts to the environment as well as an indicator of unhealthy air to the affected individuals resulting in annoyance and health related issues. These pollutants are challenging to handle due to their invisibility to the naked eye and can only be felt by the human ol...

This research examined the solidification/stabilization process of using a cement binder with actual electroplating sludge. An extensive comparative analysis was done with the cement–sludge mixture before and after the application of cement additives (kaolinite clay, waste latex paint and calcium chloride). The characterization analysis using the F...

Green and sustainable strategies aim for the development of manufacturing processes that maximize the use of resources instigating semiconductor industry to adopt zero-liquid discharge policies. Complexity and variations of semiconductor wastewater effluents opens an opportunity for resource recovery (i.e. copper from chemical-mechanical polishing)...

This study attempted to characterize the microbial community and its role in anaerobic digestion of lipid. Reactors were fed semi-continuously with three related substrates, oil and its degradation intermediates (glycerol and long chain fatty acids (LCFAs)), with a stepwise increase in organic loading rate for 90 days. Microbial community analysis...

In recent years, the technical-scientific community has been paying increasing attention to the presence of emerging contaminants that are intercepted in surface water and wastewater since these compounds could have harmful effects on human health and on environment too. Conventional wastewater treatment installations represent a source of pollutio...

Measuring odour concentration is a significant step to achieve efficient environmental odour management in continuous, objective and repeatable manner. To deal with this, researchers developed instrumental odour monitoring systems (IOMS) by applying odour monitoring models (OMM) for prediction. At present, limited data are available in the literatu...

High operational cost due to membrane fouling propensity remains a major drawback for the widespread application of membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology. As a result, studies on membrane fouling mitigation through the application of integrated processes have been widely explored. In this work, the combined application of electrochemical processes a...

Waste mobile phone is one of the subgroups of e-waste which is defined as discarded electronic products in the Philippine context. This study estimated current and projected quantities of waste mobile phones in the country using feed forward neural network. The neural network architecture used had three layers: (i) input layer, (ii) hidden layer, a...

Biodiesel was produced using three different alkali catalysts, namely KOH, NaOH and LiOH. The aim of the study was to determine which of these is the most effective as far as Fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME) yield is concerned in producing biodiesel from microalgae. Three different transesterification processes were considered; conventional, microwav...

Three different advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) were applied to investigate the removal of emerging contaminants (ECs) i.e. sulfamethoxazole (SMX), diclofenac (DCF) and carbamazepine (CBZ) in synthetically prepared aqueous solutions. The degradation of these substances was carried out by ozonation, sonolysis and photocatalytic oxidation, as wel...

Biodiesel was produced from microalgae under ultrasound assisted transesterification using synthesized novel alkali catalyst. The catalyst was prepared by impregnating potassium ions in the catalyst support by ion exchanging 1.0 N KOH solution with pumice powder. The catalyst was evaluated with Hammett indicators, X-ray Diffraction, Scanning Electr...

Odour measurement plays a crucial role in environmental odour management. Continuous odour measurement systems are promoted to keep the situation always under control, such as being able to adopt the most suitable mitigation measures in real time to avoid odour complaints and impacts. Electronic Nose (eNose) represents currently the instrument of h...

Phosphate recovery from wastewaters is one of the major engineering challenges to securing the worldwide food production. Fluidized-bed heterogeneous crystallization of struvite has been one of the most considered technologies. Nevertheless, the recovery of other phosphate products could be of the major interest at industrial level. Thus, in this w...

We measured bioaccessible lead (Pb) in simulated gastrointestinal fluids containing Pb-contaminated soil or dust from electronic waste (e-waste) recycling sites to assess the risk of Pb ingestion. The physiologically based extraction test (PBET) was used as in vitro bioaccessibility assay. Pb speciation was determined using X-ray absorption spectro...

One of the major source of complaint in relation to water quality in rivers is linked to odour emissions. However, in the monitoring and regulations for water quality, odour normally is not directly considered. This paper explores the application of the Odour Emission Capacity (OEC) as a surrogate parameter in the assessment of river water quality...

We conducted this study to assess the occurrence, profiles, and toxicity of chlorinated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (Cl-PAHs) and brominated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (Br-PAHs) in e-waste open burning soils (EOBS). In this study, concentrations of 15 PAHs, 26 Cl-PAHs and 14 Br-PAHs were analyzed in EOBS samples. We found that e-waste op...

The continuous release of emerging contaminants (ECs) in the aquatic environment, as a result of the inadequate removal by conventional treatment methods, has prompted research to explore viable solutions to this rising global problem. One promising alternative is the use of electrochemical processes since they represent a simple and highly efficie...

Solidification and stabilization are well-known technologies used for treating hazardous waste. These technologies that use cementitious binder have been applied for decades as a final treatment procedure prior to the hazardous waste disposal. In the present work, hazardous waste like fly ash containing high concentrations of heavy metals such Zn (...

In the recent decades, the use of antibiotics is of great concern due to their continuous input and persistence in aquatic ecosystems even at low concentrations. The lack of appropriate treatment systems in conventional wastewater treatment plant, the unsuitable disposal of unused or expired antibiotics and their incomplete metabolization in humans...

This study investigated the viability of treating pharmaceuticals from real municipal wastewater using electrochemical process i.e. intermittent electrocoagulation. Batch experiments were performed using a laboratory scale electrochemical reactor with aluminum and stainless steel as anode and cathode, respectively. Diclofenac (DCF), carbamazepine (...

The presence of emerging contaminants (ECs) in water resources has raised a great concern in the last decades due to their persistence in the environment and their chronic toxicological and endocrine disrupting effects on terrestrial and aquatic organisms. Thus, advanced treatment methods are necessary for the removal of these contaminants before w...

This paper provides a critical review about the integration of electrochemical processes into membrane bioreactors (MBR) in order to understand the influence of these processes on wastewater treatment performance and membrane fouling control. The integration can be realized either in an internal or an external configuration. Electrically enhanced m...

Heavy metal removal is a significant task that protects our water resources. Fluidized-bed homogeneous granulation process (FBHGP) was used to treat nickel containing wastewaters by recovering nickel in the form of nickel carbonate hydroxide granules with low moisture content rather than soft sludge. This study investigated nickel removal and recov...

This study determined the removal of nickel from a synthetic Watts bath electroplating composition (NiCl2·6H2O, NiSO4·6H2O, and H3BO3) by homogeneous fluidized-bed granulation process. The effects of adding calcium ions present in an electroplating bath while varying influent nickel concentration (200 mg·L-1, 300 mg·L-1, and 400 mg·L-1), CO3:Ni mol...

Leaking underground petroleum storage poses human and environmental health risks as it contaminates the soil and the groundwater. Of the many contaminants, benzene e a major constituent of gasoline, is of primary concern. It is an identified carcinogen with a permissible limit set at a low level of 0.005 mg L À1. This poses technical and regulatory...

Leaking underground petroleum storage poses human and environmental health risks as it contaminates the soil and the groundwater. Of the many contaminants, benzene e a major constituent of gasoline, is of primary concern. It is an identified carcinogen with a permissible limit set at a low level of 0.005 mg L À1. This poses technical and regulatory...

The present study describes the successful incorporation of graphene oxide (GO) into a binary polymer composite blend of chitosan-poly(acrylic acid) (CS-PAA) to obtain a porous hydrogel nanocomposite bead with higher lead removal and regeneration capability than any other chitosan hydrogel material or activated carbon. In the present study, we dete...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the adsorption performance of activated clay (bentonite) in removing sulfur compounds from diesel fuel. Studies have proved that oxidative desulfurization is more cost effective than the traditional hydrodesulfurization process. In this investigation, oxidative desulfurization was used under mild conditions wit...

Il riscontro della presenza nelle acque naturali di composti farmaceutici, anche se a basse concentrazioni, ha recentemente portato ad una cre-scente consapevolezza del loro potenziale pericolo per la salute. L'inadeguatezza dei processi conven-zionali alla completa rimozione di tali contaminanti, rende opportuna la sperimentazione di processi di t...

Recently, the presence of pharmaceutical compounds, defined as emerging contaminants (ECs), at low levels in the environment, has led to an increasing awareness of their health harm due to their effects such as biodiversity loss, cancer, human infertility and the ability of developing highly resistant microbial strains. Therefore, since the convent...

Water scarcity is a growing global concern and the meager fraction of the remaining renewable water is further reduced by environmental pollution. At present, meeting the world's water demand entails efforts to protect the remaining fresh water sources from contamination or conserve water by reuse processes. Both actions necessitate advanced treatm...

The ubiquitous occurrences of pharmaceuticals in the environment have resulted to emerging adverse effects to both humans and animals. The integration of chemical and biological processes is deemed as a sound, cost-effective and environment-friendly alternative of removing emerging contaminants such as pharmaceuticals found in municipal wastewaters...

Abstract The increasing application of membrane filtration in water and wastewater treatment necessitates techniques to improve performance, especially in fouling control. Ultrasound is one promising technology for this purpose as cavitational effects facilitate continuous cleaning of the membrane. This research studied ultrafiltration of lake wate...

Recently detected pharmaceuticals in the environment, labeled as emerging contaminants (ECs), are linked to serious problems of biodiversity loss, emergence of highly resistant microbial strains, human infertility and cancer. The inability of conventional wastewater treatment plants in removing these ECs causes its widespread occurrence. Thus, prot...

Advanced wastewater treatment is necessary to effectively remove emerging contaminants (ECs) with chronic toxicity, endocrine disrupting effects, and the capability to induce the proliferation of highly resistant microbial strains in the environment from before wastewater disposal or reuse. This paper investigates the efficiency of a novel hybrid p...