The biologically pretreated coal chemical wastewater (CCW) still contains a large number of toxic and refractory compounds which has posed great hazard to the environment. In the present work

a novel integration of anoxic moving bed biofilm reactor (ANMBBR) and MBBR with short-cut biological nitrogen removal (SBNR) was employed for the advanced treatment of real CCW. The results indicated the integrated process effectively alleviated the negative effects of toxic inhibitors and the low carbon/nitrogen on biological nitrogen removal. The best performance was obtained at hydraulic residence time of 12 h and nitrate/nitrite nitrogen recycling ratio of 200%. The removal efficiencies of COD

and total nitrogen were 68.1%

84.0% and 74.7%

the corresponding effluent concentrations were 48.0

4.8 and 13.9 mg·L-1

respectively

which all met class-Ⅰ criteria of the Integrated Wastewater Discharge Standard. Meanwhile

compared with traditional A2/O process

the novel integrated process had higher removal performance of and TN

especially under the high toxic loading. Moreover

the ANMBBR played a key role in degrading toxic inhibitors

which was beneficial to improve biodegradability (BOD5/COD increased by 0.3) further enhancing SBNR efficiency

and the numbers and kinds of toxic inhibitors decreased by 84.4% and 54.5%

respectively in MBBR. Therefore

the integrated processes could serve as a technically feasible and cost-effective method with potential application for advanced treatment of CCW.