Determination of pharmaceutical compounds in hospital wastewater and their elimination by advanced oxidation processes

Abstract

This study investigates the mineralization efficiency, i.e. removal of total organic carbon (TOC) in hospital wastewater by direct ozonation, ozonation with UV radiation (O/UV), homogeneous catalytic ozonation (O/Fe) and homogeneous photocatalytic ozonation (O/Fe/UV). The influence of pH and reaction time was evaluated. For the best process, toxicity and degradation efficiency of the selected pharmaceutical compounds (PhCs) were determined. The results showed that the PhCs detected in the hospital wastewater were completely degraded when the mineralization efficiency reached 54.7% for O/UV with 120 minutes of reaction time using a rate of 1.57 g O h. This process also achieved a higher chemical oxygen demand removal efficiency (64.05%), an increased aromaticity reduction efficiency (81%) and a toxicity reduction.

Is fish embryo test (FET) according to OECD 236 sensible enough for delivering quality data for effluent risk assessment?

“…The effluent is considered to be a highly complex mixture with traces of medicines, chemicals, organic pollutants, domestic sewerage, washing products, and their combined byproducts. A complete description of the sample, which was analyzed for the presence of 82 target pharmaceutical compounds, can be found in Souza et al (). Samples were taken from a single batch of 70 L collected directly from the hospital duct before its release into the urban sewage system.…”

Medical laboratory wastewater treatment by electro‐fenton process: Modeling and optimization using central composite design

“…There are studies in literature related with hospital wastewater treatment and toxicity removal from hospital wastewater by advanced oxidation processes (Ahmadzadeh et al, 2017; Ahmadzadeh & Dolatabadi, 2018; Berto et al, 2009; Munoz et al, 2016; Souza et al, 2018; Zheng, Guo, Wu, Ren, & Chang, 2018) but there is deficiency in advanced treatment of medical laboratory wastewater. Hospital wastewaters have low BOD 5 /COD ratio due to many micro and resistant contaminants they contain.…”

Photocatalytic Treatment of Pharmaceuticals in Real Hospital Wastewaters for Effluent Quality Amelioration

“…In fact, HWW is a complex water matrix, burdened with high concentrations of pharmaceuticals and metabolites, disinfectants, heavy metals, reagents, microorganisms, etc. [2,3]. Some countries consider hospital effluent as industrial wastewater and because of its characteristics, it undergoes pre-treatment before being discharged into the urban sewage system [4].…”

“…Although pharmaceuticals in hospital effluents exist in low concentrations (may vary from ng L −1 to mg L −1 ), they might pose a potential threat to the ecology of the receiving environment, such as feminization of organisms, microbiological resistance or the accumulation of these compounds in soil, plants and animals [3,6,7]. The presence of pharmaceuticals in the environment does not need to be persistent in order to cause negative effects, since the high degree of transformation or removal that they are able to incur can be overlapped by their continuous release into the environment [4].…”

“…In view of the above, this study focuses on the application of photocatalysis for PhACs removal in real unspiked HWW effluents by combining simulated solar light and different photocatalytic semiconductors. To the best of the authors knowledge, a few studies dealing with the removal of inherent micropollutant concentration levels in effluent wastewaters by AOPs have been published [3,5,40]. Thus, the aims of the present work are: (i) To identify the PhACs present in real HWW effluents by solid phase extraction tandem liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (SPE/LC-HRMS) analytical methodology; (ii) to evaluate and compare the photocatalytic degradation of PhACs under different semiconductors; TiO 2 -P25, graphitic carbon nitride (g-C 3 N 4 , CN) and a heterojunction of perovskite and graphitic carbon nitride, SrTiO 3 /g-C 3 N 4 (20% g-C 3 N 4 , 20CNSTO) in HWW effluents using simulated solar irradiation; (iii) to identify the transformation products (TPs) formed in the different photocatalytic processes by means of LC-HRMS.…”