Removal of PFOS, PFOA and other perfluoroalkyl acids at water reclamation plants in South East Queensland Australia

Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in wastewater treatment plants and drinking water treatment plants: Removal efficiency and exposure risk

“…But granular activated carbon (GAC) and reverse osmosis (RO) can remove PFASs completely when GAC is new (Takagi et al, 2011;Flores et al, 2013). To the best of our knowledge, only a few previous studies investigated multiple PFASs levels in different stages of drinking water treatment plants and most of the previous works were mainly focused on PFOA and PFOS (Shivakoti et al, 2010;Takagi et al, 2011;Thompson et al, 2011;Eschauzier et al, 2012;Flores et al, 2013). Therefore, there is still a need to understand the occurrence, fate and removal mechanism of various PFASs in various WWTPs such as membrane bio-reactor (MBR) and Unitank process as well as in DWTPs.…”

“…In DWTPs, previous studies showed that coagulation, sand filtration, ozonation, chlorination, and ultraviolet (UV) irradiation are unlikely to be effective for PFASs removal (Quiñones and Snyder, 2009;Eschauzier et al, 2010;Thompson et al, 2011). But granular activated carbon (GAC) and reverse osmosis (RO) can remove PFASs completely when GAC is new (Takagi et al, 2011;Flores et al, 2013).…”

An overview on the advanced oxidation processes applied for the treatment of water pollutants defined in the recently launched Directive 2013/39/EU

“…Although PFOS have been banned in the USA and Europe in the beginning of the 21st century, they are still used and consequently de-tected in the environment. Studies dealing with this class of persistent compounds are still limited regarding AOPs (Tables S4 and S6), only a few studies addressing ozonation (Thompson et al, 2011) and ozona-tion compared with other AOPs (Schroder et al, 2010;Schröder and Meesters, 2005). Two reports compared different AOPs to remove PFOS at different concentrations.…”

“…In 2009, they were included in the Persistent Organic Pollutant (POP) rec-ommendation list of the Stockholm Convention (Thompson et al, 2011). Although PFOS have been banned in the USA and Europe in the beginning of the 21st century, they are still used and consequently de-tected in the environment.…”

“…Diuron was poorly degraded at low pH (Chen et al, 2008). PFOS was studied in two water reclamation plants located in Australia, differing in the effluent load and in the process applied, UV/H2O2 and membrane processes leading to removals below detection limit (Thompson et al, 2011), while alkaline ozonation was unsuccessfully tested for the PFOS removal (Yang et al, 2014). Table S5 (Supplementary information) refers to the miscellaneous processes that comprise γ-irradiation with a 60 Co source, non-thermal plasma (NTP), electrochemical oxidation, sulfate radical-based AOPs and electron beam irradiation, among others.…”