A Review on Biological Processes for Pharmaceuticals Wastes Abatement—A Growing Threat to Modern Society

Abstract

Over the last decades, the production and consumption of pharmaceuticals and health care products grew manifold, allowing an increase in life expectancy and a better life quality for humans and animals, in general. However, the growth in pharmaceuticals production and consumption comes with an increase in waste production, which creates a number of challenges as well as opportunities for the waste management industries. The conventional current technologies used to treat effluents have shown to be inefficient to remove or just to reduce the concentrations of these types of pollutants to the legal limits. The present review provides a thorough state-of-the-art overview on the use of biological processes in the rehabilitation of ecosystems contaminated with the pharmaceutical compounds most commonly detected in the environment and eventually more studied by the scientific community. Among the different biological processes, special attention is given to biosorption and biodegradation.

Waste-based biosorbents as cost-effective alternatives to commercial adsorbents for the retention of fluoxetine from water

“…Although conventional wastewater treatment plants, WWTP, are effective in terms of organic matter and nutrients removal, they are not prepared for the treatment of complex micropollutants, such as pharmaceuticals [1]. Hence, several pharmaceuticals and their metabolites have been introduced in aquatic ecosystems, mainly from effluents of WWTP [2,3]. Even though pharmaceutical compounds have been detected at trace concentrations (from ng/L to µg/L levels), extremely high concentrations (up to mg/L levels) of various pharmaceutical residues have been found in effluents from drug manufacturing facilities [4,5].…”

Sustainable Biological Ammonia Production towards a Carbon-Free Society

“…Recently, biological approaches have also attracted much attention for sustainable ammonia production [37][38][39]. These biological approaches allow producing various substances under mild conditions [40][41][42][43][44]. So far, biological approaches have as well been successfully used to produce energy, such as alcohol and hydrogen, making use of raw materials such as glycerol, sugar, and fatty acids on a commercial scale [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47].…”

“…These biological approaches allow producing various substances under mild conditions [40][41][42][43][44]. So far, biological approaches have as well been successfully used to produce energy, such as alcohol and hydrogen, making use of raw materials such as glycerol, sugar, and fatty acids on a commercial scale [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. In ammonia production, the use of nitrogen fixation by nitrogenase and enzymatic production methods from food waste are beginning to be actively studied.…”

Evaluating the Ecotoxicity of Different Pharmaceuticals Using Aliivibrio Fischeri Bioassays

“…Over the last century the cause of synthesized chemicals dissemination into environment have been triggered by massive industrialization and anthropogenic activities [1]. Among the chemicals, pharmaceuticals (PHACs) have been of a particular interest due to their properties to remain biological active for long periods and to have the potential to produce toxic effects in concentrations above a certain limit [2,3].…”

“…These levels were determined from the water at the entrance to a treatment plant in Romania. This situation exist because low metabolic rate conversion in the human and animal organisms and inefficient removal in urban wastewater treatment plants [1,16,18]. A large amount of data is available concerning the monitoring of PHACs in surface water bodies such as rivers, lakes, and marshlands [19,20], but these are not centralized or in a standardized format.…”