Wastewater Treatment: Solutions Adapted to the Hospital Effluent Sector
In recent years, the worldwide consumption of pharmaceutical products has increased, as has their detection in wastewater and surface water, posing an increased risk to human health and the environment.
The presence of micropollutants in the environment can result in negative effects on the biological balance of aquatic ecosystems, causing imbalances and even posing a risk to public health if there are multi-resistant strains of antibiotics.
Wastewater has been identified as the main route by which pharmaceutical products enter the environment. After prophylactic and/or therapeutic use, pharmaceutical products are excreted mainly through urine (around 55-80%) and faeces, in the form of the original compound (unchanged) or metabolites.
Hospital effluents (HE) are characterised by the fact that they contain pharmaceutical products belonging to various therapeutic classes, such as: analgesics, antibiotics, diuretics, X-ray contrast agents, disinfectants, among others. Generally, no distinction is made in terms of the drainage of urban and hospital effluents, which are often discharged directly into the public sewerage system without any pre-treatment (or with inadequate schemes) and treated together in urban wastewater treatment plants.
It is imperative to adopt specific pre-treatment for these effluents, given that most existing wastewater treatment plants were designed with the main objective of removing macropollutants and microorganisms (generally with concentrations in the order of ppm), and not these micropollutants present in wastewater with much lower concentrations (in the ppb and ppt range).
