Occurrence of Endocrine Disruptor Chemicals in the Urban Water Cycle of Colombia

Abstract

In developing countries such as Colombia, information on the occurrence of endocrine disruptors is still incipient. Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, has a complexity at an anthropogenic and environmental level that makes it particularly important to determine the possible presence of this type of compounds and the risks associated with its presence in aquatic environments. During the present study, the occurrence of endocrine disruptors, mainly pharmaceuticals, plasticizers, and hormones in different aquatic matrices including wastewater, surface water, runoff water, and drinking water was evaluated; the results show that phthalates present the highest occurrence followed by bisphenol A, with an important participation of carbamazepine (0.68-31.45 μgL À1 ), the most commonly found compound is bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (BEHP). It was also found in the drinking water, this leads to the conclusion that endocrine disruptors in Colombia and Bogotá are a reality and deserve attention from researchers to deepen their potential sources of generation and control strategies, as well as the provision must start generating policies in this regard.

Remediation of Emerging Contaminants

“…To treat emerging contaminants, a multitude of techniques classified as physicochemical treatments, biological treatments, membrane filtration, advanced oxidation technologies, adsorption/biosorption have been proposed in the literature (Fig. 1.2) Badot 2007, 2010;Acero et al 2013;Charles et al 2014;Secondes et al 2014;Serna-Galvis et al 2016Bedoya-Ríos and Lara-Borrero 2018;Botero-Coy et al 2018;Crini and Lichtfouse 2018a, b;Kim et al 2018). Advanced treatments such as biosorption onto non-conventional materials (Wang and Wang 2016;Li et al 2019a;Fenyvesi et al 2020;Rojas and Horcajada 2020), filtration membrane coupled with a biological step, algal-based technologies, and oxidation processes combined with an adsorption pretreatment (Serna-Galvis et al 2016Rodriguez-Narvaez et al 2017) have been proposed to treat domestic water.…”