Pharmaceutical remains in waste water

There is a difference between two kinds of pharmaceutical pollution in waste water. Pharmaceutical plant and purification plant water treatment are not the same, because of the different concentrations of pollutants. That’s reason for different kinds of treatment.

In pharmaceutical plants you have higher concentrations of pollutants and also a knowledge of the substances which will be treated in every production step. This makes it more easy to find a kind of treatment, which fits exactly on the problem to remove pollutants out of water. In purification plants lower concentrations are found and one has also has an existing concept to treat water. The composition of pollutants depends on a lot of facts and it makes it more difficult estimate. In purification plants you also have a biological treatment step, which can react very sensitive on special substances.

While plants have more fine precipitations, purification plants have to do several steps of filtration and settling. In pharmaceutical plants, there is the possibility to remove substances by using ultra filtration or removal osmosis membranes which are very effective to remove nearly all kind of treatment out of water. In purification plants, these steps are not useful, because of the precipitations, which will clog the membranes. Normally, because of the lower concentrations of pharmaceutics and also chemicals, biological steps, like activated sludge treatment, fixed bed-proceeded treatment and special membrane procedures are used to clean polluted water.

In different kind of projects influences of pharmaceutics on surface water, especially antibiotics, will be examined. Scientists fear of resistance of bacteria against antibiotics, which can be dangerous to humans.

Because of the fact, that pharmaceutics are conceived to have special functions such as long durability, resistance against acid hydrolyses by oral receptions, resistance against enzymes and toxics against special bacteria, problems are not out of question.

But waste water from purification plants has low levels of this kind of pollution. More dangerous are the pollutants coming from drainage and liquid manure, which contain pharmaceutics for animals.