Application of Wastewater and Biosolids in Soil: Occurrence and Fate of Emerging Contaminants

Abstract

Wastewater (WW) for irrigation and application of biosolids in soil is becoming important as it is going to become very common in the near future. By 2050, the world is going to have four billion people living in water-scarce countries, making it a norm of freshwater for the cities and WW for agriculture. Further, biosolids might still be used as green biofertilizers for soils, if they are improved from an ecological point of view. However, application of biosolids in soil is argued because of the amount of organic pollutants that compromise the dynamic equilibrium of the biological systems. Therefore, information on the concentration, behavior, and cycling of organic pollutants as well as their possible degradation pathways is needed to predict, prevent, and remediate these pollutants from different sources including WW and biosolids. Among the group of organic pollutants, emerging contaminants (ECs) enter into the soil with the irrigation water from treated effluents and fertilization by biosolids. Quantification of ECs from WW and biosolids is of main importance to predict the toxic effects of WW effluents and sludge. Moreover, their incorporation into vegetables through irrigation and their magnification through natural food webs have been proved and must be monitored. This review presents information on the different sources of emerging contaminants and linking with the ecological effects they produced by reacting in the environment during various applications of WW and biosolids in soil. The available methods for analysis and quantification of ECs in different matrices, such as WW and biosolids, are also presented.

Assessment of microbiological and biochemical properties of dairy sewage sludge

“…In this perspective, sludge can be also transformed, e.g., into biofertilisers. This application may change the soil microbial community composition (Mohapatra et al 2016). However, field application of sludge-based organic fertilisers could be virtually neglected because of additional load of microorganism introduced into the soil with that kind of fertilisers.…”

Exposure to environmental level pesticides stimulates and diversifies evolution inEscherichia colitowards greater antibiotic resistance

“…The findings are of high relevance to the emergence of antibiotic resistance in some natural and built environments. High pesticide levels (mg/L) triggering evolution towards resistance may occur in biosolids and aquatic organisms where pesticides can be accumulated (49-51). In aquatic environments receiving WWTP effluent and agricultural runoff, antibiotics at sub-MIC levels are occurring together with pesticides at ng - µg/L (20-24).…”

Application of prioritization approaches to optimize environmental monitoring and testing of pharmaceuticals

“…The use of both treated and untreated reclaimed wastewater and biosolids in agriculture is a widely adopted practice in countries suffering from water shortages such as Mexico, Israel, Australia and Southern Europe. (Asano et al 2007;Pedrero et al 2010;Dalkmann et al 2012;Lees et al 2016) Further, crops are grown on agricultural soils and cattle producing meat and milk are grazing on grasslands that have been amended with sludge-based biosolids and/or reclaimed wastewater, which poses a potential risk of indirect human exposure via these products (Mohapatra et al 2016;Paz et al 2016;Kinney et al 2006a), which was previously demonstrated (Mottaleb et al 2016;Franklin et al 2016;Malchi et al 2014).…”

“…Extensive patient and veterinary use, incomplete metabolism, continuous use by society, and lack of rapid biodegradability of many active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) resulted in their ubiquitous presence in various environmental media (Redshaw et al 2013;Gaw and Brooks 2016;Bergheim et al 2014), and detection in non-target organisms (Miller et al 2015;Tanoue et al 2015;Cuthbert et al 2014). Pharmaceuticals can reach the environment via multiple point source and diffuse pathways including incomplete removal in conventional wastewater treatment and subsequent release into surface waters (Luo et al 2014); release of untreated wastewater directly or through combined sewer overflows (CSOs) (Mennigen et al 2011;Phillips et al 2012); migration in landfill leachate (Masoner et al 2016); agricultural use and sludge spreading (Mohapatra et al 2016); domestic septic tank discharge (Yang et al 2016); and release of manufacturing effluent (Cardoso et al 2014;Larsson 2014).…”