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.
Despite the continuous development of wastewater treatment technologies, the complete removal of synthetic pharmaceuticals using the three-step method currently in use is yet to be achieved. A number of researchers are working to improve the efficiency of the removal of these molecules from the present value of 10 to 30 percent.
As part of a campaign launched by the European Union, which culminated on 21 September, International Coastal CleanUp Day, marine waste washed up on beaches is collected in more than 80 countries on all inhabited continents, the European Commission has announced.
This astonishing video is about the creation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is twice the size of the state of Texas.
On 11 March 2011, Japan suffered a magnitude 9 earthquake, which also impacted the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. Since then, more than a million tonnes of radioactive water has been collected from the damaged cooling system of the plant, but the tanks will be filled to capacity by 2022.
The set of problems around pharmaceutical residues is extremely complex: the active compounds that are released can reach not only drinking water but also our food. Luckily, scientists have started investigating the problem, and the development of technologies able to offer a solution is also under way.
The active ingredients of various medicines are released into the environment with treated and untreated wastewater, and today they can be detected not only in surface waters but also in underground waters and the soil. But what defensive measures can we take against them? Hundreds of research groups are studying that question worldwide.
Data from the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme indicates that between 2011 and 2017, almost five thousand marine mammals were stranded around the shores of the UK.
Nine of the ten most common types of seaside waste are related to human food and drink consumption.
Three design students in Taiwan teamed up to create the Polluted Water Popsicles project so as to call attention to the increasing level of water pollution caused by the country’s economic growth and urbanisation.
Modern medical science offers effective solutions to an increasing number of health problems, and in most cases they take the form of medications. Pills make our pain go away, they improve our quality of life and aid our recovery. But, unfortunately, the effects of their active ingredients do not stop there.
