Towards sustainable water reuse: A critical review and meta-analysis of emerging chemical contaminants with risk-based evaluation, health hazard prediction and prioritization for assessment of effluent water quality

Abstract

Reuse of treated wastewater is necessary to address water shortages in a changing climate. Sustainability of wastewater reuse requires reducing the environmental impacts of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), but it is being questioned as CECs are not regulated in the assessment of effluent water quality for reuse both nationally in Sweden and at the broader European Union level. There is also a lack of details in this topic on which CECs to be addressed and methodologies to be used for assessing their environmental impacts. A better understanding of the ecological risks and health hazards of CECs associated with wastewater reuse will assist in the development of effective regulations on water reuse, (inter)nationally, as well as related treatment/monitoring guidelines. This review provides a list of specific chemical CECs that hinder sustainable wastewater reuse, and also demonstrates a holistic quantitative methodology for assessing, scoring and prioritizing their associated ecological risks and health hazards posed to the environment and humans. To achieve this, we compile information and concentrations of a wide range of CECs (∼15 000 data entries) identified in Swedish effluent wastewater from domestic (blackwater, greywater, mixture of both) and municipal settings, and further perform a meta-analysis of their potentials for 14 risk and hazard features, consisting of ecological risk, environmental hazard, and human health hazard. The features are then scored against defined criteria including guideline values, followed by score ranking for prioritization. This finally produces a unique list of chemical CECs from high to low priority based on risk- and hazard-evaluations. Out of the priority chemicals, 30, mainly pharmaceuticals, had risk quotient ≥ 1, indicating ecological risk, 16 had environmental hazard being persistent and mobile, and around 60 resulted in positive predictions for at least four human health hazards (particularly skin sensitization, developmental toxicity, hepatoxicity, and carcinogenicity). The 10 highest-priority chemicals (final score 2.3–3.0 out of 4.0) were venlafaxine, bicalutamide, desvenlafaxine, diclofenac, amoxicillin, clarithromycin, diethyltoluamide, genistein, azithromycin, and fexofenadine. Potential crop exposure to selected chemicals following one year of wastewater reuse for agricultural irrigation was also estimated, resulting in a range of 0.04 ng/kg (fluoxetine) to 1160 ng/kg (carbamazepine). Overall, our work will help focus efforts and costs on the critical chemicals in future (waste)water-related studies, such as, to evaluate removal efficiency of advanced treatment technologies and to study upstream source tracing (polluter-pays principle), and also in supporting policymakers to better regulate CECs for sustainable wastewater reuse in the future.