Abstract
Overuse of antibiotics has resulted in widespread contamination of the environment and triggered antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria. Conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are not equipped to remove antibiotics. Effluents from WWTPs are usually the primary source of antibiotics in aquatic environments. There is an urgent need for cost-effective, environment-friendly technologies to address this issue. Along with antibiotics, nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) are also present in conventional WWTP effluents at high concentrations, causing environmental problems like eutrophication. In this study, we tested vetiver grass in a plug flow reactor-based constructed wetland model in a greenhouse setup for removing antibiotics ciprofloxacin (CIP) and tetracycline (TTC), and nutrients, N and P, from secondary wastewater effluent. The constructed wetland was designed based on a previous batch reaction kinetics study and reached a steady-state in 7 days. The measured concentrations of antibiotics were generally consistent with the modeling predictions using first-order reaction kinetics. Vetiver grass significantly (p < 0.05) removed 93% and 97% of CIP and TTC (initial concentrations of 10 mg/L), simultaneously with 93% and 84% nitrogen and phosphorus, respectively. Results show that using vetiver grass in constructed wetlands could be a viable green technology for the removal of antibiotics and nutrients from wastewater.
Highlights
We determined that the initial drop in the antibiotic concentration followed first-order reaction kinetics [58]
The results obtained in this study show that vetiver grass in a constructed wetland setup was able to remove antibiotics and nutrients with high efficiency
As constructed wetland is a cost-effective and green technology, it can be used as a retrofit for an existing wastewater treatment plant or act independently to remove traditional and emerging contaminants
Summary
Ciprofloxacin (CIP) is one of the major fluoroquinolone antibiotics that is used in human health care and veterinary practices. TTC is administered to animals as a growth promoter in concentrated animal feeding operations. Both CIP and TTC are non-volatile solids and contain acidic and basic functional groups. Depending on the pH, they can exist as anions, cations, or zwitterions in the aqueous phase. Their solubility and octanol-water distribution ratio depend on the solution pH [8,9,10]
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