Systematic Assessment of Treating Selected Pharmaceuticals by Ferrate (VI)

Abstract

Pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) and endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are classified as emerging micropollutants. A great concern for the researchers is the removal of micropollutants from the environment. As there is no 100% efficient treatment method or process to remove all these micropollutants, efficient techniques are needed and one such attempt is the introduction of ferrate (VI). Ferrate (VI) exhibits dual functions as oxidant and coagulant and its promising performance in the treatment of wastewater has been recorded. The efficiency of ferrate (VI) depends on its dose, pH and the chemical/physical properties of the pollutants. After all these years’ researches,the knowledge of treating micropollutants by ferrate (VI) still needs to be explored further. Therefore, this study aims to assess the ferrate (VI) performance in the removal of selected pharmaceuticals (simvastatin, ivermectin, fluoxetine hydrochloride and oxytetracycline hydrochloride) from water samples with the following objectives: 1) to develop reliable analytical methods for the determination of the given pharmaceuticals in water samples; 2) to investigate the performance of ferrate (VI) during treatment of selected pharmaceuticals from water samples; 3) to assess the influence of ferrate (VI)dosage and solution pH on the degradation of selected pharmaceuticals; 4) to investigate the toxicity before and after ferrate (VI) treatment of the selected pharmaceuticals, where zebrafish animal model and vibrio fischeri luminescent test were employed to achieve the study targets. The results clearly showed both ferrate (VI)dose and solution pH played major role in reducing concentrations and toxicity of the studied pharmaceuticals by ferrate (VI), and the formation of certain oxidation byproducts was observed. Results also revealed that simvastatin exhibited high toxicity even at low concentrations such as 10 and 100 pg/L in comparison with other tested pharmaceuticals used in this study. The toxicity studies also clearly indicated that ferrate (VI) significantly reduced the toxicity by partially removing the micro pollutants from water samples during the treatment process and very importantly, ferrate (VI)itself did not show any additional toxicity to the water samples. Future work is recommended to investigate the formation of oxidation products and to assess their toxicity as well. It is also recommended to perform chronic toxicity testing as the aquatic life gets exposed to all these chemicals for a longer duration of time (sometimes whole life cycle) in water bodies.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Glasgow Caledonian University
Supervisor	JiaQian Jiang (Supervisor) & Xinhua Shu (Supervisor)