Removal of Xenobiotic Compounds from Wastewater for Environment Protection: Treatment Processes and Costs

Although the technologies available today can produce high quality water even from wastewater, most wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove emerging xenobiotic contaminants such as endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) and pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs). The majority of EDCs and PPCPs are more polar than most regulated contaminants and several have acidic or basic functional groups. EDCs and PPCPs properties, together with their occurrence at trace levels, create unique challenges for the removal processes and the consequent upgrading of wastewater treatment plants. Therefore, in this study ten different wastewater treatment trains are proposed in order to upgrade the conventional wastewater treatment plants. These schemes are based on the multi-barrier concept and include different advanced treatment processes such as membrane processes (membrane bio-reactors, nanofiltration, and reverse osmosis), adsorption on activated carbon (GAC) or biological activated carbon (BAC), advanced oxidation processes (AOPs). Based on the existing data on the effectiveness of these treatment processes for the removal of EDCs and PPCPs, the proposed treatment schemes appear very effective in the removal of a wide range of compounds at trace levels in domestic wastewater. In order to evaluate and compare the feasibility of the proposed different treatment schemes the cost per cubic metre of treated water (Total Unit Cost, TUC) was calculated for several sizes of plant. Therefore, obtained cost functions may be used to estimate the treatment cost for the upgrade of the plant size of interest.