Household waste-specific ambient air shows greater inhalable antimicrobial resistance risks in densely populated communities

Zhipeng Zheng; Wenhui Ji; Xiao Wang; Xueting Wang; Simin Dai; Zhaowen Zhang; Yinghua Zhang; Xiaoyan Wang; Shen Cao; Min Chen; Bing Xie; Jun Feng; Dong Wu

doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2025.01.030

Household waste-specific ambient air shows greater inhalable antimicrobial resistance risks in densely populated communities

Waste Manag. 2025 Jan 23:194:309-317. doi: 10.1016/j.wasman.2025.01.030. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Zhipeng Zheng¹, Wenhui Ji¹, Xiao Wang², Xueting Wang¹, Simin Dai³, Zhaowen Zhang⁴, Yinghua Zhang⁴, Xiaoyan Wang⁵, Shen Cao⁵, Min Chen³, Bing Xie⁶, Jun Feng³, Dong Wu⁷

Affiliations

¹ Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Biotransformation of Organic Solid Waste, School of Ecological and Environmental Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, PR China; Chongqing Key Laboratory of Precision Optics, Chongqing Institute of East China Normal University, Chongqing 401120, PR China.
² Pudong District Center for Disease Control & Prevention, Shanghai 200136, PR China.
³ Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control & Prevention, Shanghai 200336, PR China.
⁴ Minhang District Center for Disease Control & Prevention, Shanghai 201101, PR China.
⁵ Yangpu District Center for Disease Control & Prevention, Shanghai 200090, PR China.
⁶ Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Biotransformation of Organic Solid Waste, School of Ecological and Environmental Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, PR China.
⁷ Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Biotransformation of Organic Solid Waste, School of Ecological and Environmental Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, PR China; Chongqing Key Laboratory of Precision Optics, Chongqing Institute of East China Normal University, Chongqing 401120, PR China. Electronic address: dwu@des.ecnu.edu.cn.

PMID: 39862584
DOI: 10.1016/j.wasman.2025.01.030

Abstract

Household waste is a hotspot of antibiotic resistance, which can be readily emitted to the ambient airborne inhalable particulate matters (PM₁₀) during the day-long storage in communities. Nevertheless, whether these waste-specific inhalable antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) are associated with pathogenic bacteria or pose hazards to local residents have yet to be explored. By high-throughput metagenomic sequencing and culture-based antibiotic resistance validation, we analyzed 108 airborne PM₁₀ and nearby environmental samples collected across different types of residential communities in Shanghai, the most populous city in China. Compared to the cold-dry period, the warm-humid season had significantly larger PM₁₀-associated antibiotic resistomes in all types of residential communities (T-test, P < 0.001), most of airborne ARGs in which were estimatedly originated from disposed household waste (∼ 30 %). In addition, the airborne bacteria were assembled in a deterministic approach (iCAMP, P < 0.01), where the waste-specific bacteria taxa including Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas, Rhodococcus, and Kocuria had the predominant niches in the airborne microbial assemblages. Notably, these waste-sourced bacteria were also identified as the primary airborne hosts of ARGs encoding the aminoglycoside resistances. Among them, some antibiotic resistant human pathogens, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii, not only exhibited higher ARG horizontal gene transfer (HGT) potential across the microbial assemblages, but also imposed direct infection risks on the local residents by 2 min inhalation exposure per day. When the daily exposure duration increased to 11 min, the infection-induced illness burden became unignorably high, especially in densely populated urban communities, being twofold greater than rural areas.

Keywords: Airborne PM(10); Antibiotic resistance genes; Community exposure; Household waste; Inhalable risk assessment; Metagenomics-based method.