Abstract
There has been increasing research focus on the detection and occurrence of wastewater contamination in aquatic environment. Wastewater treatment plants receive effluents containing various chemical pollutants. These chemicals may not be fully removed during treatment and could potentially enter the receiving water bodies. Detection of these chemical pollutants and source identification could be a challenging research task due to the diversified chemical and functional groups, concentration levels and fate and transportation mechanisms of these pollutants in the environment. Chemical markers such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products, artificial sweeteners, fluorescent whitening agents, sterols and stanols, and nitrate and nitrogen isotopics have been widely used by most research as markers. These markers served as indicators of wastewater contamination to the receiving bodies due to their frequent usage, resistance to biodegradability and, more importantly, anthropogenic origin. These markers are commonly used in combination to identify the contaminant source of different origins. This article discusses the main chemical markers that are used to identify wastewater contamination in receiving bodies, the current trends, and approach to select suitable chemical markers.
Highlights
Climate change, increasing population growth and reduced reliable supply of water resources have created many challenges to sustainable water supply management
Various classes of chemicals have been proposed as chemical markers to detect wastewater contamination
Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) and artificial sweeteners (ASs) have been shown to be specific to wastewater contamination
Summary
Climate change, increasing population growth and reduced reliable supply of water resources have created many challenges to sustainable water supply management. New development in microbial source tracking (MST) has established tools to identify and discriminate sources of wastewater contamination, i.e., between human and non-human, and among different animals [18,19,20,21,22] These include molecular methods to establish the library of DNA profiles for fecal bacteria, protozoan and viruses. This review article served to provide a summary of the current state of knowledge in applying chemical markers for wastewater contamination identification in surface water. This provides valuable insights to the regulatory and engineering communities and could aid in the development of safe water management strategies
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