A Pioneering Process Could Help Detect and Remove Wastewater Pollutants

An all-female team of researchers from The Medical School at Swansea University in partnership with the international company Biotage has developed a method to help minimize the environmental impact of wastewater pollutants. These pollutants include conventional pharmaceuticals and chemicals like aspirin, paracetamol, ibuprofen. This new method detects these wastewater pollutants and swiftly removes them.

Their research, which was published in Analytical Science Advances, outlines how they have developed a single process to quantify and separate a broad spectrum of different chemicals successfully. These are from personal care and bathroom products and other pharmaceuticals that can end up in blood plasma and wastewater sludge.

The team believes that the new method can help reduce or minimize the negative impact of these products and pharmaceuticals on the environment by hastening people's understanding of which pollutants may be released.

According to one of the authors, Dr. Rachel Townsend, once a drug has been ingested, the body excretes it, and many people do not think or know what happens to these drugs after taking them. Just like any food, upon excretion, this goes to a wastewater treatment plant.

Townsend said that it was initially thought that pharmaceuticals are degraded once it enters the water treatment process. However, the study has determined that it is otherwise. This poses a new problem because wastewater is released in streams or rivers after it passes through the treatment process. This problem may also affect food crops as 80 percent of treated sludge is recycled and goes back as fertilizers in agricultural lands.

There have been concerns that the sludge from wastewater treatment facilities used in the agricultural sector could impact human health. Apart from this, the adverse effects of these pharmaceutical seeping through wastewater have been noted on different animals. Multiple vultures in Asia, for example, are critically endangered due to Diclofenac. This non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication has not just affected the population of vultures in Asia. Still, it has decreased the number of Indian long-billed vultures and the red-headed vultures by almost 99 percent.

The feminization of male fish has been determined as a leading cause of the significant decline in the population of fish over the last two years. This feminization has been attributed to the use of the female contraceptive pill.

The team has pioneered a process using the sample preparation approach QuEChERS to detect a range of products, either pharmaceutical or for personal care, from a variety of sources such as the wastewater sludge. Previously, extraction involved multiple methods. With this novel process using mass spectrometric detection, determining the presence of these compounds as well as extracting and quantifying them is now more time and resource-efficient than before.

This new study can also shed more light on the development of antimicrobial resistance and how it spreads in society. This knowledge can also equip the scientific community in safeguarding water quality and overall health by making changes in the wastewater treatment processes. This can help ensure the degradation and removal of pollutants and aid in global environmental management.