Estado de conocimiento sobre los procesos de sorción de PPCPs en barros activados

ONTIVEROS G. Y CAMPANELLA E.

Congreso; VII Congreso de Medio Ambiente de la AUGM; 2012

The pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) belong to the group of emerging contaminants whose environment risk had not been detected until a decade ago. Recently, these compounds have been reported to cause adverse effects on wildlife and human. In addition, the majority of these compounds finish in wastewater treatment plants, where it may suffer biodegradation processes, sorption on biomass or stripping. Many relevant researches have been carried out for study PPCPs biodegradation; however, scant information about their sorption process is available. Therefore, the objective of this work is summarized the knowledge about this topic in order to identify the current state of art and to clarify possible research directions. An inspection of existing material yields to positive results related with the understanding of the involved mechanisms. Nevertheless, has been determined that the sorption of many PPCPs in biomass is not ideal, quite the opposite is a complex process. As a result of this complexity simplified models proposed cannot achieve a complete description, even more; the prediction of environmental partitioning is not precise enough for some cases. A more detailed study of the adsorption process of PPCPS in activated sludge is necessary to improve the models proposed and to optimize the prediction of partitioning. Information on the sorption of PPCP, its metabolites, and competition between them is not enough yet to be incorporated into these models.