 
Evaluate wastewater treatment technologies
Wastewater from households and hospitals is the most important pathway for humans pharmaceuticals to the aquatic environment. Improved treatment efficiency at wastewater treatment plants is therefore an important control option. In Sweden and in other European countries the major part of the population is connected to wastewater treatment plants where different treatment technologies are applied depending of plant size, geographical location or recipient for the wastewater. Many investigations have found great variability in removal efficiency e.g. between different classes of treatment plants.
The search for improved treatment efficiency is therefore a question of finding solutions that match the most significant pharmaceuticals, quantify the reduction of these in existing treatment plants and the utilization of new treatment methods, which can be combined with the present ones. The role of the Work Package is to make this match between the need for removal of only a few out of the many pharmaceuticals on the Swedish market, the varying degree of reduction at existing wastewater treatment plants and the potential for removal/destruction of pharmaceuticals with methods specialised for that purpose. The outcome of the work package is expected to be the identification/development of a panel of methods that can match the needs for further reduction of the most harmful pharmaceuticals at all types of the present Swedish wastewater treatment plants. |
