“…However, adding Cl 2 as a pre-oxidant in water treatment can lead to the breakdown of the aromatic structures in natural organic matter, resulting in the formation of hydrophilic moieties through an oxidation process, which has potential applications in drinking water treatment (Chu et al 2016;Gan et al 2019). The release of Mn (II) from KMnO 4 in this reaction can oxidize various impurities in raw water (Bai et al 2019;Wang et al 2020a), while the PAC may act as a low-cost adsorbent, which is always used in emergency treatment (Sawana et al 2017;Yao et al 2018). Therefore, this research employed ATZ as the target pollutant to evaluate alternative pre-oxidation methods combined with ozonation.…”