During the past years the presence of pharmaceuticals in the environment has attracted the attention of the scientific community as well as raised public concern, as they could pose a serious risk to the environment. The presence of pharmaceutical active compounds (PhACs) in the natural aquatic environment reinforces the fact that conventional activated sludge (CAS) technologies for wastewater treatment do not remove these compounds efficiently. In recent years, an increasing number of publications have been reporting the efficiency of alternative wastewater treatment technologies able to eliminate pharmaceuticals from wastewater in a more efficient matter. Among all the new technologies studied, membrane bioreactors (MBRs) and fungal bioreactors (FBRs) are currently at different stage of implementation: MBR technology has become an accepted alternative to CAS technology for municipal wastewater treatment, not only with regard to PhACs removal but also regarding the overall effluent water quality, whereas fungal treatment has shown its efficiency in removing recalcitrant and toxic PhACs at laboratory scale, but its implementation in full-scale WWTPs is still under consideration. In this work, removal efficiencies of PhACs in MBRs, followed by nanofiltration or reverse osmosis, <i>i.e.,</i> the so-called integrated membrane systems, and in FBRs are evaluated, paying special attention to the removal of transformation products (TPs) of the target contaminants. These TPs are not only present in raw wastewater but also generated during water treatment, both in MBRs and FBRs and can also contribute to ecotoxicological impact of wastewater effluents in the receiving waters.

Challenges and solutions for the removal of pharmaceuticals from wastewater: The use of fungal treatment and integrated membrane systems

255th National Meeting (2018)

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