Eawag and ETH: Drug production leaves a trace in the aquatic environment
Using an amazingly simple trick, a team of researchers from Eawag and ETH succeeded in demonstrating the influence of a single pharmaceutical manufacturer on water quality downstream of wastewater treatment plants: Because the concentration profile of substances depends on typical production cycles, a distinction can be made between industrial wastewater and domestic wastewater, even far downstream.
A team of researchers from Eawag, ETH and a spin-off has now demonstrated that a single pharmaceutical company can influence the water quality of an entire river.
Active ingredients from medicines and their degradation products end up in wastewater treatment plants from households. Some of them also end up in streams and rivers because wastewater treatment cannot remove everything. The same applies to substances from wastewater from the pharmaceutical industry.
Industry entries...
Little is known about the water pollution caused by the pharmaceutical industry - partly because details about production are company secrets. The research team led by doctoral student Sabine Anliker and environmental analyst Heinz Singer has now studied the treated wastewater from two wastewater treatment plants in the Rhine catchment area - one that only treats wastewater from households and small businesses, and one to which a pharmaceutical company is also connected.
...recognized thanks to typical patterns
For three months, the researchers collected daily samples of the treated wastewater and analyzed the substances in it using high-resolution mass spectrometry. Because pharmaceutical companies usually produce one substance for a while and then the next, the scientists looked for substances whose concentrations varied greatly.
They were able to identify 25 substances with typical, sometimes recurring concentration patterns, including antidepressants and opioids. Their concentration peaks were several times higher than in purely domestic wastewater.
Think about improved wastewater pretreatment
In this study, the team was unable to investigate whether the pharmaceutical manufacturer's treated wastewater affects the aquatic ecology downstream of the treatment plant. But according to Heinz Singer, the analyzed concentrations are of a magnitude "that it makes sense to think about improving the company's internal wastewater pretreatment." What's particularly amazing, Singer says, is that the concentration patterns found were still clearly visible 100 kilometers downstream, at the Rhine monitoring station near Basel.
"Thus, a relatively small amount of wastewater from a single industrial operation not only leaves a trace in the wastewater treatment plant effluent, but can affect the water quality of one of Europe's most important rivers," the authors write in their article just published online in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
This text is based on a media release from the American Chemical Society ACS.
Simplified procedure of the examination (graphic from the article: Sabine Anliker)
Original publication:
Assessing Emissions from Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Based on Temporal High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry Data; Sabine Anliker, Martin Loos, Rahel Comte, Matthias Ruff, Kathrin Fenner, Heinz Singer; Environ. Sci. Technol; online publication: March 25th, 2020. https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.9b07085
