Occurrence and Fate of Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in Wastewater

Diclofenac removal by simulated solar assisted photocatalysis using TiO2-based zeolite catalyst; mechanisms, pathways and environmental aspects

“…In spite of their ubiquity in water environment and documented harmful behavior [2][3][4][5][6], most of pharmaceuticals are not being regulated by drinking water standards. However, three pharmaceutical compounds; 17β-estradiol, 17αethinylestradiol and diclofenac (DCF), are added to the "watch list" in order to gather monitoring data for the purpose of supporting future prioritization [1].…”

Micropollutants in wastewater in four arctic cities - is the treatment sufficient?

“…The internal factors are the biodegradability and the physiochemical and properties related to the micropollutants including the sorption capacity, the acidity, the compound structure and size, and the volatilization rate (Eggen & Vogelsang, 2015;Luo et al, 2014a). In order to reduce the discharge of micropollutants from a WWTP it is therefore important to know the wastewater characteristics and how target compounds can be eliminated in the treatment processes.…”

“…The external factors includes e.g. the sludge retention time (SRT), hydraulic retention time (HRT), redox conditions, temperature, pH and organic loading (Eggen & Vogelsang, 2015;Luo et al, 2014a). Studies show that the degree of removal of micropollutants in the primary treatment processes are highly depended on the sorption capacity of micropollutants, and this step is therefore ineffective in the removal of many highly water soluble micropollutants.…”

“…The removal of micropollutants can be further improved by means of tertiary treatment, including advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), membrane filtration, and adsorption. These methods are however often very energy consuming, can cause undesired byproducts and are affected by both internal and external factors (Eggen & Vogelsang, 2015;Luo et al, 2014a).…”

“…Therefore, in order to get the most effective removal of micropollutants, it could be considered to upgrade the treatment with both secondary and tertiary treatment steps. Several different tertiary treatment processes have proven efficient in the removal of micropollutants where the most promising are advanced oxidation processes and activated carbon (Altmann et al, 2014;Margot et al, 2013;Eggen et al, 2014) which are mostly followed by some type of filtration, e.g. ultrafiltration or sand filtration.…”