Abstract
BackgroundPharmaceuticals and their metabolites are inevitably emitted into the waters. The adverse environmental and human health effects of pharmaceutical residues in water could take place under a very low concentration range; from several µg/L to ng/L. These are challenges to the global water industries as there is no unit process specifically designed to remove these pollutants. An efficient technology is thus sought to treat these pollutants in water and waste water.Methodology/Major ResultsA novel chemical, ferrate, was assessed using a standard jar test procedure for the removal of pharmaceuticals. The analytical protocols of pharmaceuticals were standard solid phase extraction together with various instrumentation methods including LC-MS, HPLC-UV and UV/Vis spectroscopy. Ferrate can remove more than 80% of ciprofloxacin (CIP) at ferrate dose of 1 mg Fe/L and 30% of ibuprofen (IBU) at ferrate dose of 2 mg Fe/L. Removal of pharmaceuticals by ferrate was pH dependant and this was in coordinate to the chemical/physical properties of pharmaceuticals. Ferrate has shown higher capability in the degradation of CIP than IBU; this is because CIP has electron-rich organic moieties (EOM) which can be readily degraded by ferrate oxidation and IBU has electron-withdrawing groups which has slow reaction rate with ferrate. Promising performance of ferrate in the treatment of real waste water effluent at both pH 6 and 8 and dose range of 1–5 mg Fe/L was observed. Removal efficiency of ciprofloxacin was the highest among the target compounds (63%), followed by naproxen (43%). On the other hand, n-acetyl sulphamethoxazole was the hardest to be removed by ferrate (8% only).ConclusionsFerrate is a promising chemical to be used to treat pharmaceuticals in waste water. Adjusting operating conditions in terms of the properties of target pharmaceuticals can maximise the pharmaceutical removal efficiency.
Highlights
Pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs, bblockers and X-ray contrast media are widely used in our daily life
This paper aims to address the issue of the performance optimisation of pharmaceutical treatment by ferrate (VI)
Chemicals and Reagents Ciprofloxacin (98%, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) grade), ibuprofen (98%, GC grade), ibuprofen sodium salt (IBU-Na) and potassium ferrate (VI) (.90%) were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich; ciprofloxacin hydrochloride BioChemica (CIP?HCl) was purchased from VWR; other chemicals and reagents used were obtained from Fisher Scientific
Summary
Pharmaceuticals such as antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs, bblockers and X-ray contrast media are widely used in our daily life These pharmaceuticals and their metabolites cannot be fully utilized by human beings or animals and are inevitably emitted into the waters by execration [1,2,3,4] and/or through the discharge of industry effluents and hospitals waste waters [5,6]. The adverse environmental and human health effects of pharmaceutical residues in water could take place under a very low concentration range; from several mg/L to ng/L. These are challenges to the global water industries as there is no unit process designed to remove these pollutants. An efficient technology is sought to treat these pollutants in water and waste water
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