Removal of Pollutants in Wastewater using Plastic-Based Media Biofiltration: A Meta-Analysis

The use of plastics as a biofilter medium is an environment-friendly and effective technology for reducing pollutants in liquid waste. The main objective is to analyze the ability of biofilters with plastic media to remove pollutants in wastewater by looking at several parameters. Various types of data were developed and analyzed to answer specific goals set through the search engines EBSCO, Scopus, and ProQuest by examining several parameters, including wastewater source, research scale, research period, temperature, media type, media thickness, and pollutant removal. The obtained data were processed to determine the distribution of the descriptions. Data related to biofiltration using plastic media was obtained from 152 articles, with only 14 articles in the search category. These findings show that all types of plastic media are effective for biofilm attachment and bacterial growth, resulting in a very large removal of pollutants present in liquid waste. Biofilters with plastic media are also known to be able to remove contaminants such as Chemical Oxygen Demand, biological oxygen demand, total organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, ammonia nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide, toluene, ammonia, diethanolami, phenol, total suspended solids, and Escherichia coli. Synthetic wastewater (35.71%) was the most common wastewater source. Research related to biofiltration using plastic as the medium is mostly carried out on a laboratory scale with a total of 64.30% and using units of the day as an indicator of changes in a total of 71.42%, with an average experimental temperature of 29.1 °C.