Pharmaceuticals and personal care products in water and wastewater: a review of treatment processes and use of photocata
- PDF / 1,986,850 Bytes
- 29 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 102 Downloads / 203 Views
BMC Chemistry Open Access
REVIEW
Pharmaceuticals and personal care products in water and wastewater: a review of treatment processes and use of photocatalyst immobilized on functionalized carbon in AOP degradation Adewumi Olufemi Oluwole, Elizabeth Oyinkansola Omotola and Olatunde Stephen Olatunji*
Abstract The presence of emerging contaminants such as pharmaceutical and personal care products in many aqueous matrices have been reported. One of such matrix is streams of wastewater, including wastewater treatment plants inflows and outflows and wastewater flow by-passing wastewater treatment plants. Their persistence arises from their resistant to breakdown, hence they may remain in the environment over long time, with a potential to cause adverse effects including endocrine disruption, gene toxicity, the imposition of sex organs, antibiotic resistance and many others in some aquatic organisms exposed to arrays of residues of pharmaceutical and personal care products. Among the treatment techniques, advanced oxidation processes have been reported to be a better technique through which these PPCPs can be degraded in the WWTPs. Heterogeneous photocatalysis using various photocatalyst immobilized on solid support such as activated carbon, graphene and carbon nanotubes in AOPs have been shown to be a viable and efficient method of PPCPs degradation. This is because, the performance of most WWTPs is limited since they were not designed to degrade toxic and recalcitrant PPCPs. This review highlight the occurrence, concentration of PPCPs in wastewater and the removal efficiency of heterogeneous photocatalysis of TiO2 immobilized on solid supports. Keywords: Ppcps, Wastewater, WWTPs, AOPs, Heterogeneous photocatalysis, Photocatalyst immobilized, Activated carbon/graphene/carbon nanotubes solid support, PPCPs degradation, Removal efficiency Introduction The expansion in the world’s population, economic development, the industrial revolution, and climate change has led to an increase in the quantity of waste generation as well as an increase in the introduction of specific categories of compounds referred to as emerging contaminants, into the environments. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) described “emerging contaminants” as chemicals or materials which were previously not listed *Correspondence: [email protected] School of Chemistry and Physics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, Durban 4000, South Africa
for routine monitoring, characterized by a perceived potential or real threat to human and environmental health, and lacks published health standard, environmental protection laws, and regulations [1]. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), emerging contaminants are “any synthetic or naturally occurring chemical or any microorganism that is not usually investigated in the environment but can find its way into the environment and cause known or suspected adverse ecological and/or human health effects”. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop methods for the removal of these emerging cont
Data Loading...
