Treatment of a landfill leachate containing compounds of pharmaceutical origin

Abstract

Paper reports the results of landfill leachate treatment with membrane bioreactor, nanofiltration and ozonation. Investigated leachate encompasses a number of specific compounds of pharmaceutical origin, including a suite of by-products deriving from the production of vitamin C and propyphenazone. Low biodegradability was observed in MBR (16%) for propyphenazone, while the removal of intermediates from the vitamin C-synthesis was moderate, reaching 30% for diacetone sorbose (DAS) and 69% for diacetone alpha-keto-gulonic acid (DAG). Ozonation almost completely removed propyphenazone but failed to significantly oxidise intermediates from the vitamin C-synthesis. Nanofiltration of the leachate succeeded to remove 99% of DAG and 79% of propyphenazone which made it the most efficient among techniques used.

Advanced Oxidation Processes: Process Mechanisms, Affecting Parameters and Landfill Leachate Treatment

“…AOPs can be used as a standalone system or integrated with other system as post-treatment (Derco et al, 2002;Kamenev et al, 2002) or pre-treatment system (Silva et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2013;Wu et al, 2004) in landfill leachate treatment. However, researchers often criticized AOPs because of its high treatment cost (Matošic et al, 2008;Chamarro et al, 2001) regardless of its excellent treatment efficiency. Due to the above-mentioned reason, AOPs are not favoured as a standalone system for complete mineralization of organic compounds (Ghazi et al, 2014).…”

Removal of antimicrobials using advanced wastewater treatment

“…A special attention in the last few years was paid to the advanced filtration and oxidation techniques [8,9,19,20]. Unlike ultrafiltration, nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) are rather efficient in rejecting most of the pharmaceutical compounds from the wastewater effluents [8].…”

An integrated membrane bioreactor

“…Additionally, in the case of alpha-keto gluconic acid removal (from landfill leachate), NF alone already showed removal results comparable to those obtained with a full MBR NF process. This makes the application of an MBR obsolete in this case [50]. Also in this case, the low removal by the MBR was the consequence of the low biodegradability of the components in the feed.…”