Hospital effluents as a source of emerging pollutants: An overview of micropollutants and sustainable treatment options

Abstract

Hospital wastewaters contain a variety of toxic or persistent substances such as pharmaceuticals, radionuclides, solvents and disinfectants for medical purposes in a wide range of concentrations due to laboratory and research activities or medicine excretion. Most of these compounds belong to the so called emerging contaminants; quite often unregulated pollutants which may be candidates for future regulation depending on research on their potential health effects and monitoring of their occurrence. Their main characteristic is that they do not need to persist in the environment to cause negative effects since their high transformation/removal rates can be compensated for by their continuous introduction into the environment.

Some of these compounds, most of them pharmaceuticals and personal care products may also be present in urban wastewaters. Their concentrations in the effluents may vary from ng L−1 to μg L−1.

In this paper, hospital effluents and urban wastewaters are compared in terms of quali–quantitative characteristics. On the basis of an in-depth survey: (i) hospital average specific daily water consumptions (L patient−1 day−1) are evaluated and compared to urban ones (L person−1 day−1), (ii) conventional parameters concentrations in hospital effluents are compared to urban ones and (iii) main pharmaceuticals and other emerging compounds contents are compared in the two wastewaters. Finally, an overview of the removal capacity of the different treatments is reported.