Water Pollution Crisis
12 September 2019
More and more pharmaceutical drugs are sold each year, which, along with their benefits, have their disadvantages, too: some of the active ingredients are discharged from our bodies unchanged and they end up polluting our natural waters. Our current knowledge suggests that this does not carry a significant health risk, but as we do not know the long-term effects of the process, it is a problem for which we must find a solution in the near future, for instance by introducing new technologies.
The majority of today’s wastewater management systems are unable to remove a significant proportion of pharmaceutical agents, so they are deposited in natural waters with the treated effluent of wastewater treatment plants, and into underground waters through the soil.
But if we evaluate those results while taking the water yield of larger rivers into account as well, which may be several hundred or even several thousand cubic metres per second, we see a much more alarming picture, as this is equivalent to a complete pill of the respective active ingredient floating by every few minutes. And that’s only one compound, while in fact a combination of several dozen compounds and their metabolites are present in our natural waters.
In addition to rivers, pharmaceuticals can also be detected in lakes and in underground waters (well water), and in recent years, some studies have also found them in tap water. All of those papers emphasise that the concentrations of those materials in tap water are very small, with only a few tens or at most hundreds of nanograms (one billionth of a gram) per litre of water.
So pharmaceuticals are present in our waters in very low concentrations only, but, on the other hand, several hundred different compounds are all present at the same time. The drugs detected in extremely low concentrations in aquifer waters, sometimes pumped from depths of over a hundred meters are indications not of health risks but rather the environmental impact of deep aquifer wells drilled in a careless and uncontrolled fashion – warns the Geographical Institute of the Astronomy and Earth Science Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Science.
It was announced in 2010 that the Vietnamese government would like to build a water treatment plant in Central Vietnam. Hungary is famous for its water treatment technology so they decided on a Hungarian partner.
The Trappist monks of Koningshoeven Abbey have been brewing beer since 1881, and in recent years, they have also been baking bread and making chocolate, honey and cheese. The water to be treated is the wastewater from these brewing and manufacturing activities, together with the municipal wastewater from the Abbey and the visiting centre.
Specialists believe almost 30 kilograms of microplastics has eroded from such a quantity of golf balls into the water.
Over the last three decades, summer algal blooms in all large fresh-water lakes around the world have grown more severe – this is the conclusion of a global study, the longest ever of its kind, conducted by researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science and NASA.
The system created by a Dutch inventor called System 101, whose first trial run, conducted a year ago, had failed, has started collecting plastic waste on the Pacific again.
Many studies worldwide have shown that the active compounds of medications are released into the environment with wastewater and can easily be reintroduced into the human food chain from there. Filtering these residues out is an increasingly acute concern, but, thankfully, the world of science has already responded to the problem.
Researchers from Canada and Africa have found a massive amount of plastic bottles, originating form Asia, mainly from China, on Inaccessible Island, located in the South Atlantic Ocean. The bottles were probably discarded into the water and then washed up on the island from cargo ships passing the region.
In Hungary, too, the active ingredients of various medications are discharged continuously into the environment with wastewater, so they can now be detected in surface and underground waters as well as in soils.
After being introduced into human and animal organisms, some pharmaceutical compounds are secreted via urine unchanged, and then, through wastewater, those compounds may reach surface waters that serve as drinking water supplies, representing a risk for both aquatic ecosystems and for the purity of drinking water.
We’ve known for a long time that plastic food packaging, wearing car tyres and clothing made of synthetic fibres are all sources of microplastic pollution. However, a new study has identified a new source of pollution in our kitchens, or more precisely in our teacups.
