Treatment of pharmaceutical and personal care products in wastewater

Abstract Recently, pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) have attracted wider attention as emerging contaminants. Due to their widespread production, consumption, improper disposal, and nondegradable nature, they accumulate in aquatic and terrestrial environment causing serious hazards to ecosystem and human health. The determination of these PPCPs in water bodies and wastewater has been extensively reported. They are released as effluents from antibiotic manufacturing units, hospitals, and household, which ultimately end up in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). In most of the cases, there is an inadequate removal of these contaminants in WWTP effluents at nanogram per liter or microgram per liter concentration, which can pose a potential risk of uptake, accumulation, and diffusion into the food chain causing health hazards when disposed in water bodies and reused in agriculture. Some of these PPCPs such as antibiotics are not directly toxic but their recalcitrance can cause antibiotic-resistant bacteria to thrive and proliferate causing their dissemination in the environment. Their synthetic origin and chemical stability makes their degradation difficult. Hence there is an acute need to develop and implement efficient, economical, convenient treatment and removal technologies. This chapter will focus on the fate of PPCPs in WWTPs, and discuss critically about the existing advanced technologies for their removal.