Elimination of pharmaceuticals in sewage treatment plants in Finland

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products in effluent matrices: A survey of transformation and removal during wastewater treatment and implications for wastewater management

“…It has also been suggested that some metabolites, in particular glucuronide conjugates, can be transformed back into the parent PPCP during secondary treatment. 43,62,63 These examples highlight the need for future studies to include metabolites when assessing the fate of PPCPs during secondary treatment.…”

“…43,70,75,76,134 Unfortunately, to date no single approach has emerged that accurately predicts PPCP removal during wastewater treatment over a wide range of treatment technologies, water quality conditions, and PPCP compounds and compound classes.…”

Rapid detection of multiple class pharmaceuticals in both municipal wastewater and sludge with ultra high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

“…The median removal efficiency of BF was found to be 87% in six Italian WWTPs (Castiglioni et al, 2006), similar to that observed (83%) in this study. It is notable that CBZ showed a negative removal efficiency (i.e., − 67%), which possibly arose from the transformation of the conjugated forms (e.g., glucuronide conjugate, hydroxylated metabolites) into the free form by microorganisms (Miao et al, 2005;Vieno et al, 2007). Table 4 presents the concentrations of target pharmaceuticals in various sludge samples (i.e., anaerobic, anoxic, oxic, and return) along the A/A/O treatment process.…”

“…Because conventional wastewater treatment processes are not specifically designed for the effective removal of pharmaceuticals, the secondary effluent and the sludge of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) have been proven to be an important pollution source of pharmaceuticals (Nakada et al, 2006;Vieno et al, 2007). Nowadays, serious concerns have been raised regarding the occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the environment due to an increasing reuse of wastewater effluent and excess sludge (e.g., landscape irrigation, crop irrigation, biofertilizer) (Sabourin et al, 2012;Wu et al, 2012).…”

Residual pharmaceutically active compounds (PhACs) in aquatic environment - status, toxicity and kinetics: a review

“…When a pharmaceutical is occurring mainly in the dissolved phase, biodegradation is suggested to be the most important elimination process in wastewater treatment. It can occur either in aerobic (and anaerobic) zones in activated sludge treatment, or anaerobically in sewage sludge digestion (Vieno et al, 2007). In addition, biological decomposition of micro-pollutants, including PhACs, increases with an increase in hydraulic retention time.…”