Pharmaceuticals & Personal

care products in the

environment: A review

Prepared By : Binyam Kebede &

Bingquan Chen

December 7, 2017 KTH, Stockholm, Sweden

 Presentation Outline
➢ Introduction
➢ Environmental risks of PPCPs
➢ Technologies for Removing PPCPs
➢ Conclusion and future perspectives
 What Are They?
• Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs)
Sources and pathways of PPCPs

(Source Ebele et al., 2017)

Classification of PPCPs
 Environmental Effects
• Endocrine disrupting effect on fish - effect of 17α-ethynylestradiol on fathead
minnow
• Toxic effect on aquatic organisms

(Source: Harada et al., 2008)

 Environmental Effects
• Antibiotic resistance in bacteria and viruses
• Affect natural microbial communities that play a major
role in fundamental ecological processes
• The toxic mixture effect of the pharmaceuticals are higher
than the individual effect (Watanabe et al., 2016)
 Environmental Effects
• PPCPs taken in by humans are estimated to be 9.8 μg per capita per week
(Calderon-Preciado et al., 2011)
• Lack of data on the direct effect on human body
• Damage body function and slow down growth on rats.

(Bartrons and Peñuelas, 2017)

 Technologies for Removing PPCPs
• Adsorption processes
Activated Carbon Metal organic frameworks
 Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs)
• Includes
✓ Ozone (O3)
✓ O3/UV
✓ UV/H2O2
✓ Fenton oxidation
• Effective in degrading PPCPs
- Theoretically broken down into harmless components
- Must consider degradation products
•High operating costs associated with the consumption of energy
and chemicals
 Membrane filtration
• Nano filtration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) found effective
• Membrane bioreactor (MBR)
• Removal mechanism (steric exclusion, adsorption and electrostatic repulsion )
• Fouling of membrane negatively affects the removal
 Multiple-treatment (hybrid) processes
• Have been found very effective
• Includes
➢ MBR – AOP (Nguyen et al., 2013)
➢ MBR-reverse osmosis (Dolar et al., 2012)
➢ ozonation–biological activated carbon (Reungoat et al., 2012)
➢Membrane ultrafiltration - Activated carbon - ultrasound irradiation (Secondes et al., 2014)
 Conclusion and future perspectives

• Conventional wastewater treatment methods should be improved

• More attention should be given to hybrid process

• More research is needed on

➢ Effect of continual long-term exposure to low concentrations PPCPs in
humans
➢ Additive and synergistic effects
➢ Occurrence and toxicity of PPCPs metabolites and transformation products
➢ low-cost and sustainable wastewater treatment technologies
Thank You!