As one of the world’s leading pig industry countries, China produces a large amount of swine wastes every year, which may harbor elevated levels of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), such as antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Because of the rough management of pig farms, the adjacent environment could be contaminated by those CECs through the discharge and farmland application of swine wastes. This work presents regional data about the occurrence of typical antibiotics (e.g., sulfonamides, tetracyclines, and macrolides) and ARGs in swine wastewater, manure and adjacent environment. Moreover, the removal efficiencies of those pollutants by on-farm treatment porocesses were investigated and several advanced treatment technoligies were tried to eliminate antibiotic residues after biological tratement. The results show that the maximum detected concentration reached up to 2.02 mg/L and the highiest dection frequency was 95.1% in swine wastewater samples collected from 21 swine farms located in Shandong Province, China. As for manure, the maximum concentration and detection frequency were 764.4 mg/kg and 96.8%, respectively. The detection concentrations and frequencies of antibiotics in winter samples were generally higher thant those in summer samples. As derived pollutants of antibiotics, ARGs were widely distributed in the swine farms, presenting relative abundances of 2.74×10-6 ~1.19 along the waste treatment paths (i.e., raw wastwater and manure, waste treatment facilities, and fertilized soils). The on-farm biological treatment processes, such as microbial fermentation bed, septic tank, biogas digester, and composting, showed conservative removal of antibiotics and ARGs, thus necessary advanced treatments were required. According to the results obtained from lab- and pilot-scale experiments, integrated processes combining biological treatment and chemical oxidation (e.g., Fenton’s reagent, O3 and O3/UV) could provide comprehensive removal of antibiotics and ARGs in swine wastewater.

Occurrence, transport, and removal of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes in swine farms: Regional pollution and proposed strategies

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