Abstract: Bioconversion of wastewater sludge (WWS) has made a substantial progress over last years. Traditionalmicrobial products from WWS such as compost or methane are well studied, but other value added products (VAPs)such as biopesticides, microbial inoculants or industrial enzymes are now proposed. These WWS based VAPs are low cost biological alternativesthatcan compete with chemicalsorothercostly biological productsin fructuous markets. However, when WWS is used as a raw material for VAPs production, questions still remain about the occurrence and persistence of toxic organic compounds (TxOCs) within biotransformed WWS, especially their toxic intermediates
resulting from partial biodegradation.The microbialstrains and techniques used for producing these VAPscan possibly remove these organic pollutants. Some literature findings concerning the impact of value added production on TxOCs removal are discussed in this paper. The potential of “value added producers” to degrade or detoxify TxOCs and toxic intermediatesis also discussed.This paper proposesthat futurevalue added processesshould focustoobtain TxOCs free- WWS based VAPsfor preventing environmentalcontamination as well asfavouring commercialization and public
acceptance for these novel products.
Keywords: Wastewatersludge, bioconversion,value added products, toxicorganiccompounds, degradation products.