By: Jackeline Santillano
Antibiotics have
become majorly important to industrial companies that maintain livestock but
who knew that even wastewater contained antibiotics as well. The purpose of a
Biological Wastewater Treatment Plants is to remove antibiotics to reduce as
many suspended solids as possible in the wastewater before it is returned back
to the environment. The three antibiotics that are being looked at are
sulfamethoxazole, ciprofloxacin, and tetracycline and what factors enhance
their removal efficiency by using activated sludge modeling. This would
consist of using a group of mathematical methods to model activated sludge
systems which is the removal of waster from sewage or industrial wastewater by
using biological floc made up of bacteria and protozoa. By using tetracycline
as an example, it would suggest that altering environmental exposure and risk
prediction would be a productive beginning. This provides advancement in
environmental sustainability because the removal of antibiotics brings less
harm to the environment because it helps prevent the development of antibiotic
resistant genes in organisms that live in or around the water dump site. The
trade-off to this technology would be that antibiotics are still not
sufficiently removed from sewage and more research is needed to create a new
and better technology.
References:
Polesel,
F.; Andersen, H. R.; Trapp, S.; Plósz, B. G. Removal of Antibiotics in
Biological Wastewater Treatment Systems—A Critical Assessment Using the
Activated Sludge Modeling Framework for Xenobiotics (ASM-X). Environmental Science
& Technology 2016, 50 (19), 10316–10334.
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