Associated Health Risks From Heavy Metal-Laden Influent/Effluent From Wastewater Treatment Plant

Abstract

The wastewater treatment process significantly decreases the negative impact of the effluent on human health compared to the influent. This probabilistic study, based on mathematical formulas, which does not involve clinical studies, investigates the impact of polluting chemical elements on health, which may be higher or lower, depending on other direct or indirect factors. The conclusions from this study were (1) wastewater (the effluent, which falls within legal limits) cannot be used for domestic consumption, much less as drinking water; (2) regarding dermal absorption, this can only be possible if people use the wastewater (influent/effluent) for recreational purposes (bathing, fishing, etc.). If this were theoretically possible, the risks related to the respective water matrices can be much higher because in this study only five heavy metals (Cd, Pb, Cu, Ni, and Zn) found in the international legislation in the categories of substances with carcinogenic risk, were investigated in the wastewater, and it may also contain other substances with different risk degrees. In the future studies will be investigated the health risk assessment gradient related to the effluent from the point of discharge of the wastewater on the flow of the natural receiver.

Contributions to the Study of Heavy Metals Polluting From the Environment, by Atomic Spectrometry

“…The indexing of the samples is given in the tables below, (tables 1 -5), together with the determined Contributions to the study of heavy metals polluting from the environment, 124 by atomic spectrometry pH values. The pH values are correlated with the concentration of heavy metals present in samples [24,28]. From the tables above it follows that the collected soil has a moderate pH -basic in the surface samples, moderate -basic and in the deep samples, with the exception of the Parcul 800 Doicesti area, where at depth the pH of the soil is weak -basic [1].…”

“…The comparative analysis of the methods addressed demonstrated that none of these techniques, used individually, is fully satisfactory for the wide variety of problems involved in the analysis of chemical elements ( eg the heavy metals) at the trace element level. In order to cover the entire range of elements that must be analyzed in a sample, it proved necessary to use these methods in a complementary way with the biomonitoring technique, obtaining correlated results for a series of elements [1,20,21,24]. by atomic spectrometry…”