Photo oxidative treatment of pharmaceutical laden wastewater

Abstract

Globally, antibiotics consumption has increased by 65% from the year 2000 to 2015. newlineAnalyses based on sales volumes in 2010 reveal that India is the largest consumer of newlineantibiotics in the world with 12.9×109 standard units of consumption. The agricultural use newlineof antibiotics including the quantity used to treat individual animals with bacterial newlineinfections, prevent infections in herds or flocks and to promote growth was 63,200 tonnes newlineglobally, which was much higher than the quantity used in human pharmaceuticals in newline2010. The agricultural use is projected to rise by two-thirds, to 1,05,600 tons by the year newline2030. However, the antibiotics consumed is only partially absorbed in the human/animal newlinesystem and 20-80% of the drug gets excreted in its parental or metabolized form. Thus, a newlineconsiderable proportion of the antibiotics ends up in sewage and also in water and soil newlinesystems. This poses specific challenges to the sewage treatment systems because newlineconventional treatment systems fail to remove the antibiotics completely. Advanced newlineoxidation processes (AOPs), first proposed in the 1980s for drinking water treatment newlineand later widely studied for the treatment of different wastewaters, is considered as an newlineefficient method for treating, not only pharmaceutical residues in wastewater but also newlineother refractory organic matters and trace organic contaminants. During the AOP newlinetreatment of wastewater, hydroxyl radicals (OH·) and/or sulfate radicals (SO4 ·and#8722;) could newlinebe generated in sufficient quantity to mineralize the organic pollutants, or to increase wastewater biodegradability as a pre-treatment prior to an ensuing biological treatment. newlineIn the present study, the degradation and extent of mineralization (i.e. fate) of newlineSulfadiazine (SDZ), a therapeutic agent from sulfonamide (SA) class of antibiotics newlinecommonly applied to treat bacterial infections in human and also as a growth promotor in veterinary/animal husbandry, were experimentally investigated in selected AOP newlinesystems.