Potential and Feasibility of the Microalgal System in Removal of Pharmaceutical Compounds from Wastewater
Presence of pharmaceutical compounds in wastewater streams is a matter of great concern as the persistence nature of these chemicals affects the terrestrial and aquatic organisms. Conventional effluent treatment plants from pharmaceutical industries are n
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duction The revolutionized development of resources and technologies has produced a lot of chemicals which possess potential threats to the living systems (Bolong et al. 2009). Environment pollution due to presence of pharmaceuticals in wastewater streams is recognized as a major threat to aquatic environment globally as they affect the terrestrial and aquatic organisms (Khetan and Collins 2007). Pharmaceuticals are defined as therapeutic products used to prevent or treat human or animal diseases. These products are consumed by human and animals and then released into sewage streams as parent compounds or their metabolites during excretion as urine or feces, etc. (Al Aukidy et al. 2014; Daughton 2001). Apart from this, pharmaceutical manufacturing processes like chemical synthesis and fermentation processes are responsible for generation of large volume of wastewater containing very high levels of spent solvents, recalcitrant organics, pharmaceutical residues, as well as salts (Chen et al. 2008). Since conventional wastewater treatment plants are designed to remove these products, they are available in different concentrations in different natural water bodies (Ternes et al. 2004). These pharmaceuticals products finally enter into surface water after partial removal by wastewater treatment plants. Pharmaceuticals and personal care products, surfactants, surfactant residues, plasticizers and various industrial additives, and a large group of chemicals are collectively known as M. Chabukdhara (*) Department of Environmental Biology and Wildlife Sciences, Cotton University, Guwahati, Assam, India M. Gogoi Department of Biomedical Engineering, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya, India S. K. Gupta Environmental Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 S. K. Gupta, F. Bux (eds.), Application of Microalgae in Wastewater Treatment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13913-1_10
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endocrine disruptors, which are not metabolized and released into wastewater treatment plants (Boxall et al. 2012). Currently these pharmaceutical products are extensively available in different aquatic streams around the world. Their omnipresence possesses a huge problem to the terrestrial ecosystems as well as animal kingdom. In the recent years, algae-based technologies in wastewater treatment have been drawing huge attention from researchers due to their cost-effectiveness (Abinandan and Shanthakumar 2015; Wang et al. 2016; Wu et al. 2012). Algal biomass assimilates nutrients from wastewater, and valuable products such as biofertilizer (Cai et al. 2013), biofuel, proteins, carbohydrates, pigments, and vitamins can be produced by algae during treating wastewater (Cuellar-Bermudez et al. 2017; da Silva et al. 2014; Úbeda et al. 2017). Moreover, algae capture CO2 via photosynthesis process and hence reduce greenhouse gas (Razzak et al. 2013; Subashchandrabose et al. 2011). Apart from these, alga
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