Abstract
The use of greywater for irrigation is becoming a common practice in arid regions such as the Southwestern US, the Middle East, Australia, and China. While greywater supplies nutrients to soil ecosystems, the possible impact of trace contaminants, particularly pharmaceuticals and personal care products, has not been determined. This paper examined the impact of triclosan, an antibacterial agent commonly added to consumer products, on microbial populations and microbial diversity in soil irrigated with greywater. While there was no change in the total number of heterotrophic microorganisms in the soil, both the types and the antibiotic resistance of the microorganisms were significantly influenced by triclosan. The proportion of the microbial isolates resistant to antibiotics increased while at the same time, overall diversity of the microbial community decreased.
Highlights
Greywater (GW) is the used water from households, excluding sewage from toilets and, in some countries, waste materials from food preparation [1,2,3]
The pots were divided into two groups on the basis of the solution used for routine irrigation— control pots were irrigated with triclosan-free synthetic greywater (GW) while treatment pots were irrigated with synthetic greywater supplemented with 2.0-μg mL−1 triclosan (GWT; Table 1) [3, 12]
There were significant differences in the numbers of culturable heterotrophic microorganisms between the pots irrigated with GW and those irrigated with Greywater plus Triclosan (GWT) over the course of the study (Figure 1(a)) despite there being no statistically significant difference between the treatments initially
Summary
Greywater (GW) is the used water from households, excluding sewage from toilets and, in some countries, waste materials from food preparation [1,2,3]. Greywater accounts for between 50 to 80% of wastewater coming from individual households [3,4,5]. The use of GW for the irrigation of lawns, ornamental plants, and other landscape vegetation has become an accepted practice in the Southwest US, the Middle East, and the Australian dry lands [4,5,6]. Domestic GW differs in composition from typical domestic wastewater [11,12,13]. Greywater is highly variable in composition depending on the number and lifestyle of the residents in a household [11, 14, 15]. GW has pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), including antimicrobial agents such as triclosan, at concentrations equal to or higher than those in domestic wastewater [2, 17]
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