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Considerable amounts of pharmaceuticals are used in human and veterinary medicine, which are not efficiently removed during wastewater and slurries treatment and subsequently entering continuously into freshwater systems. The intrinsic biological activity of these non-regulated pollutants turns their presence in the aquatic environment into an ecological matter of concern. We present the first quantitative study relating the presence of pharmaceuticals and their predicted ecotoxicological effects with human population and livestock units. Four representative Iberian River basins (Spain) were studied: Llobregat, Ebro, Júcar and Guadalquivir. The levels of pharmaceuticals were determined in surface water and sediment samples collected from 77 locations along their stream networks. Predicted total toxic units to algae, Daphnia and fish were estimated for pharmaceuticals detected in surface waters. The use of chemometrics enabled the study of pharmaceuticals for: their spatial distribution along the rivers in two consecutive years; their potential ecotoxicological risk to aquatic organisms; and the relationships among their occurrence and predicted ecotoxicity with human population and animal farming pressure. The Llobregat and the Ebro River basins were characterized as the most polluted and at highest ecotoxicological risk, followed by Júcar and Guadalquivir. No significant acute risks of pharmaceuticals to aquatic organisms were observed. However potential chronic ecotoxicological effects on algae could be expected at two hot spots of pharmaceuticals pollution identified in the Llobregat and Ebro basins. Analgesics/antiinflammatories, antibiotics and diuretics were the most relevant therapeutic groups across the four river basins. Among them, hydrochlorothiazide and gemfibrozil, as well as azithromycin and ibuprofen were widely spread and concentrated pharmaceuticals in surface waters and sediments, respectively. Regarding their predicted ecotoxicity, sertraline, gemfibrozil and loratidine were identified as the more concerning compounds. Significantly positive relationships were found among levels of pharmaceuticals and toxic units and population density and livestock units in both surface water and sediment matrices.

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This review summarizes the advances in environmental analysis by liquid chromatography-high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) during the last decade and discusses different aspects of their application. LC-HRMS has become a powerful tool for simultaneous quantitative and qualitative analysis of organic pollutants, enabling their quantitation and the search for metabolites and transformation products or the detection of unknown compounds. LC-HRMS provides more information than low-resolution (LR) MS for each sample because it can accurately determine the mass of the molecular ion and its fragment ions if it can be used for MS-MS. Another advantage is that the data can be processed using either target analysis, suspect screening, retrospective analysis, or non-target screening. With the growing popularity and acceptance of HRMS analysis, current guidelines for compound confirmation need to be revised for quantitative and qualitative purposes. Furthermore, new commercial software and user-built libraries are required to mine data in an efficient and comprehensive way. The scope of this critical review is not to provide a comprehensive overview of the many studies performed with LC-HRMS in the field of environmental analysis, but to reveal its advantages and limitations using different workflows.

The presence of thousands of microcontaminants in wastewaters and their potential risks has drawn a large attention of the scientific community during the last years. The presence of these contaminants is especially controversial when wastewater is considered for reuse because a large number of microcontaminants are frequently not totally removed by conventional wastewater treatment processes. As a contribution to the knowledge in this field, this chapter focuses on the application of four well-known and widely used technologies to the elimination of microcontaminants. Membranes, activated carbon, ozonation, and advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) are deeply reviewed to assess their efficiency and safety in the elimination of these contaminants from wastewater effluents. A brief description of each technology is presented together with a review of their real application, mostly in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). A deep analysis of the found data allows to conclude that the four presented alternatives can be useful for microcontaminant mitigation although none of them seem to be a universal barrier for microcontaminants when used separately. In addition, each technology presents drawbacks which demand further research to be overcome. Depending on the final use of reclaimed water, the treatment may require the combination of several of the studied technologies although that results in an economic impact which cannot be neglected.

This work investigated the application of a solar driven advanced oxidation process (solar Fenton), for the degradation of the antibiotic ofloxacin (OFX) in various environmental matrices at a pilot-scale. All experiments were carried out in a compound parabolic collector pilot plant in the presence of doses of H2O2 (2.5 mg L(-1)) and at an initial Fe(2+) concentration of 2 mg L(-1). The water matrices used for the solar Fenton experiments were: demineralized water (DW), simulated natural freshwater (SW), simulated effluent from municipal wastewater treatment plant (SWW) and pre-treated real effluent from municipal wastewater treatment plant (RE) to which OFX had been spiked at 10 mg L(-1). Dissolved organic carbon removal was found to be dependent on the chemical composition of the water matrix. OFX mineralization was higher in DW (78.1%) than in SW (58.3%) at 12 mg L(-1) of H2O2 consumption, implying the complexation of iron or the scavenging of hydroxyl radicals by the inorganic ions present in SW. On the other hand, the presence of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in SWW and RE, led to lower mineralization per dose of H2O2 compared to DW and SW. The major transformation products (TPs) formed during the solar Fenton treatment of OFX, were elucidated using liquid chromatography-time of flight-mass spectrometry (LC-ToF-MS). The transformation of OFX proceeded through a defluorination reaction, accompanied by some degree of piperazine and quinolone substituent transformation while a hydroxylation mechanism occurred by attack of the hydroxyl radicals generated during the process leading to the formation of TPs in all the water matrices, seven of which were tentatively identified. The results obtained from the toxicity bioassays indicated that the toxicity originates from the DOM present in RE and its oxidation products formed during the photocatalytic treatment and not from the TPs resulted from the oxidation of OFX.