Occurrence and environmental risks of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in urban wastewater in the southwest monsoon
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Occurrence and environmental risks of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in urban wastewater in the southwest monsoon region of India Arun Kumar Thalla
&
Adhira Shree Vannarath
Received: 8 February 2020 / Accepted: 12 February 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Municipal wastewater treatment plants (MWWTPs) are considered to reduce the amount of pollutants that enter water reservoirs as a result of wastewater disposal. An assessment of the occurrence and removal of pharmaceutical compounds, mainly nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), in wastewater from the Kavoor MWWTP (southwest monsoon region), India, is presented in this paper. The performance of the MWWTP was monitored in the summer (May) and monsoon (September) periods. The highest inlet concentrations of diclofenac, naproxen, ibuprofen, ketoprofen, and acetylsalicylic acid in the wastewater were observed in May and were 721.37, 2132.48, 2109.875, 2747.29, and 2213.36 μg/L, respectively. The ketoprofen content was found to be higher than that of other NSAIDs in the influent in both seasons, whereas the diclofenac content was found to be the lowest. The removal efficiency (RE) of the target NSAIDs in the Kavoor secondary treatment plant varied from 81.82–98.92% during the summer season. During the monsoon season, the influent NSAID concentration level dropped, probably because of infiltration in old sewer pipes. In addition, a 100% RE was achieved for all the target NSAIDs in the wastewater of the
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-020-8161-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. A. K. Thalla (*) : A. S. Vannarath Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka Surathkal, Mangalore, Karnataka 575025, India e-mail: [email protected]
MWWTP. The results showed that secondary treatment plants have the potential to remove NSAID compounds from municipal sewage with consistent performance. The environmental hazards caused by the accumulation of such compounds in water reservoirs are due to open discharge. The environmental risk levels of these compounds were also studied by the environmental risk assessment (ERA) using the European Agency for Evaluation of Medicines approach. Keywords Municipal wastewater treatment plant . Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs . Southwest monsoon region . Removal efficiency . Environmental risk assessment
Introduction Recently, studies on “emerging contaminants” have received full attention among researchers because of the considerable effects of such compounds upon prolonged exposure. One such contaminant group is pharmaceutical compounds, which are extensively used by animals and humans for medicinal purposes. The probable pathways by which these contaminants enter the environment include (1) animal or human excreta, (2) the discarding of expired or unused medicines, (3) wastewater generated from pharmaceutical industries, and (4) hospital effluents (Lu et al. 2016; Man
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