ReviewRemoval of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) from wastewater: A review
Introduction
Pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) have been widely used in many fields such as medicine, industry, livestock farming, aquaculture and people's daily life. They are becoming ubiquitous in the environments due to their extensive applications and poor removal by the conventional biological wastewater treatment plants. They can be classified into several classes based on their various purposes (Daughton and Ternes, 1999). The specific classes, corresponding purposes and main properties of PPCPs were listed in Table 1. PPCPs have been received increasing attention since 2000s. The worldwide production of PPCPs was over 1 × 106 tons in 1993 (Daughton and Ternes, 1999). In 2003, the annual production of penicillin was 28,000 tons amounting 60% of the world total consumption of antibiotics (Richardson et al., 2005). Antibiotics contain more than 50 products (Mompelat et al., 2009), and penicillin is just one of the antibiotics. Although their assumption is not accurate, PPCPs have many classes, and each class includes many products. The annual production of PPCPs can be higher than 2 × 107 tons. Moreover, this production still increases due to the high demands of PPCPs in preventing or curing disease and sustaining the development of economic such as aquaculture and livestock farming. Consequently, environmental pollution caused by extensive application of PPCPs is becoming more and more serious.
Nowadays, the rising attention from the world has been paid to the fate of PPCPs in the environment, which can be attributed to the two reasons. One reason is the ubiquity of PPCPs in the environment resulting from their widespread use; the other reason is the progress in analytical technology, which enables people to detect PPCPs in trace level.
The PPCPs can be introduced into the environment by direct and indirect pathways. The way of PPCPs entering to the environment was reviewed by Mompelat et al. (2009). Briefly, PPCPs can enter the surface water via directly discharging into the surface water by industries, hospitals, households and wastewater treatment plants and through land runoff in case of biosolids spread on agricultural land, which can reach the groundwater by leaching or bank filtration. Within the surface water compartment, sediment can adsorb the PPCPs because it has a variety of binding sites (Kästner et al., 2014). Soil can be also one of the sink for PPCPs. PPCPs can pass into the soil by the irrigation with the treated or untreated wastewater containing PPCPs. In addition, for some PPCPs, they can transfer to soil by atmospheric wet deposition (Kallenborn et al., 2004).
Many studies have shown that PPCPs occurred in the surface water with the concentration ranging from ng/l to μg/l (Calamari et al., 2003, Moldovan, 2006, Kasprzyk-Hordern et al., 2008, Huerta-Fontela et al., 2011, Wu et al., 2015, Roberts et al., 2016), in the ground water at concentration level of ng/l to mg/l (Cabeza et al., 2012, López-Serna et al., 2013), in sediment with the concentration reaching μg/kg (Richardson et al., 2005) and in soil achieving μg/kg (Karnjanapiboonwong et al., 2011, Gottschall et al., 2012).
The advance in the development of analytical technology enables people to detect PPCPs in trace level. Improvement of extraction method combining with advanced analytical techniques, such as gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS) and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), significantly increases the ability to detect the distribution of PPCPs in the environment.
PPCPs are recognized as pseudo persistent organic pollutants in the environment, which may display the same risk to the environment as the truly persistent organic pollutants due to their continuous introduction into the environment by means of different ways such as sewage treatment plants. Although the concentrations of PPCPs in the environment are very low as aforementioned, they still can affect water quality and ecosystem balance, and even impact drinking water resources. Studies have been conducted to investigate the environmental risk of PPCPs by comparing the difference between predicted concentration and measured concentration or predicting the adverse effect concentration with regard to specific organisms (Hernando et al., 2006, Verlicchi et al., 2014), which provided theoretical basis for determining the environmental risk of PPCPs. In addition to the comparison between the predicted and measured concentration or the effect on the specific organisms, the environmental risk of PPCPs was also characterized in terms of bioaccumulation, toxicity and persistence (Mendoza et al., 2015). In order to eliminate the potential risk of the PPCPs, it is necessary to get rid of the PPCPs from wastewater. As a result, many methods including physical, chemical and biological methods have been developed to remove the PPCPs during the wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs).
The objective of this paper is to review the current knowledge on the removal of PPCPs from the wastewater, as well as the analytical techniques used to determine the PPCPs in the environment.
Section snippets
Analytical methods of PPCPs
Analytical method is the prerequisite for investigating the fate of PPCPs in the environment. The analysis of targeted compounds usually includes three steps. The first step is to select the proper analytical instrument. Gas chromatography (GC) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) are two most widely used instruments. The requirement of sample preparation is easier for HPLC than that for GC. Water sample after filtration (usually 0.45 μm filter) can be directly injected into the
Removal efficiency of PPCPs by WWTPs
Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are considered as the main unit to remove or degrade the pollutants from wastewater. The conventional biological treatment process adopted in the WWTPs is activated sludge system. It has the capacity to remove the PPCPs from the wastewater, but the removal efficiency of PPCPs changed greatly, and varied with the physiochemical properties of compounds as well as environmental conditions such as the biological reactor configuration and operational parameters
Removal of PPCPs
Although the concentrations of PPCPs in the environment are low, continuous exposure to these compounds is a critical concern with unknown long-term impacts. As a consequence, the removal of PPCPs gained much attention. Generally, removal methods of PPCPs fall into three categories: physical, biological and chemical methods. Among chemical methods, advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) have been widely investigated. Thus, the review will be stated with the following order: physical, biological,
Concluding remarks and perspectives
The conventional wastewater treatment process, especially activated sludge system, cannot effectively remove the PPCPs, which are frequently detected in the effluents. Moreover, the removal of PPCPs during the activated sludge system can be affected by many factors, such as the composition of PPCPs, pre-treatment system, microbial community existing in the activated sludge system and the environmental conditions as well as operational conditions. Thus, activated sludge system as the most widely
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51338005) and the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT-13026).
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