Comparison of dilution factors for German wastewater treatment plant effluents in receiving streams to the fixed dilution factor from chemical risk assessment

Optical properties and photochemical production of hydroxyl radical and singlet oxygen after ozonation of dissolved organic matter

“…(3)(4)(5) Because wastewater is usually discharged to a receiving water body (e.g., river, lake, sea) and can represent an important fraction of the receiving water, ozone-induced transformations of DOM are of interest. (6,7) DOM plays an important role in the photo-transformation of contaminants in surface waters by absorbing a portion of sunlight, thereby decreasing the direct photo-transformation of contaminants (equation 1), and by producing reactive intermediates (RI). These RI include excited triplet state of the DOM ( 3 DOM*, equation 2), singlet oxygen ( 1 O2, equation 3) and hydroxyl radical ( • OH, equation 4, where DOM' represents a transformed chromophore of DOM).…”

The treatability of trace organic pollutants in WWTP effluent and associated biotoxicity reduction by advanced treatment processes for effluent quality improvement

“…pharmaceuticals, bactericides, and flame retardants) and biological responses (e.g. photosynthesis inhibition, estrogenic activity, and carcinogenic effects) detected in wastewater, provides strong evidence of the adverse effects of secondary effluent (SE) on aquatic environments (Escher et al, 2014;Leusch et al, 2014;Pasquini et al, 2014;Link et al, 2017). With growing attention being focused on surface water pollution, there is an urgent need to improve the water quality of SE, which is one of the most significant sources of pollution to surface waters.…”

Environmental risk assessment associated with the occurrence of emerging organic micropollutants in Sewage Treatment Plants

“…In order to underpin the reliability of the risk assessment methodology, an uncertainty analysis was conducted. A Monte Carlo simulation with 70,000,000 iterations was applied to quantify the uncertainties of RQs (Wu et al, 2011;Federle et al, 2014) Link et al (2017) revealed DFs equal to 2 for about 10% of streams.…”

“…The corresponding probabilities in rivers with DFs equal to 10, 100 and 1000 are practically 0% for Daphnia magna and fish, while in rivers with DF equal to 2 the probabilities for these organisms range from 0.7% to 4%, for RQmean and RQmax, respectively. Taking into consideration that a significant number of European STPs release their effluents in streams with DFs lower than 10 (Link et al, 2017), the aforementioned results indicate that TCS may pose a serious ecological risk to the aquatic ecosystems and efforts should be made to reduce its concentration levels in treated wastewater and receiving surface water.…”