Studies have shown that pharmaceuticals are present in the effluent of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), particularly when advanced treatment processes are not carried out. Removal of pharmaceuticals is generally poor during primary treatment due to many drugs’ low Kow and/or lower pKa than the pH of wastewater, which prevents effective adsorption to particles. During secondary treatment, removal efficiency varies from negative values to 100%. As a result, several treatment plants (mainly water resource recovery facilities) have included advanced treatments in their routine treatment processes to decrease the concentrations of pharmaceuticals and other contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in their final effluents. A lot of effort is also being put into developing newer techniques for removing pharmaceuticals and other CECs from wastewater. In this review, we compared the removal effectiveness of conventional techniques such as activated sludge, membrane bioreactor (MBR), reversed osmosis (RO), activated carbon adsorption, and advanced oxidation process (AOP) to that of “modified-conventional” or emerging techniques such as nanotechnology, nano-membrane hybrid technologies, electrochemical AOP, etc. Among the conventional methods, AOP techniques removed &gt; 90% of most pharmaceuticals. Removal increased when two or more conventional treatment methods were combined. Nanotechnology showed a lot of promise although most studies are bench-scale. There is a potential for immense improvement in the removal of pharmaceuticals from wastewater by combining conventional and emerging technologies.

Review of the use of conventional and emerging technologies for removing pharmaceuticals from wastewater

2019 Fall National Meeting

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