Pollutants emerging

Investigating available and emerging pollution-control technologies... 

AOPs are valuable tertiary treatments allowing not only inactivation of a wide spectrum of pathogens but also the removal of a great number of the so-called emerging pollutants (pharmaceutical, personal care products). These are not totally removed during conventional treatment, but remain in the wastewater effluents [33]. Among different alternatives electrochemical oxidation with bom doped diamond electrodes (BDD) has been reported to be effective on eliminating... 

In this chapter the new trends in analytical chemistry for determining classical and emerging pollutants, as well as the use of predictive exposure models have been reviewed and their respective benefits and shortcomings have been briefly discussed. 

In order to run these models, it is necessary to have input data, mainly physicochemical properties and toxicological data (for both human and ecosystems), which can be extracted from different information sources. The source selection is essential to obtain data of high quality. In some cases (e.g., emerging pollutants) there is a lack of physicochemical and toxicological data which makes it necessary to use tools such as QSARs. 

Despite the existence of several databases for certain substances, it is not possible to find physicochemical and/or toxicological parameters to assess the risk for all substances. The lack of data is one of the main problems in risk assessment. This is especially true for emerging pollutants. One solution to solve this problem is the use of QSAR or estimation tools. QSAR models correlate the structure of the substance with their activities (physicochemical properties, environmental fate, and/or toxicological properties). 

Fungal-Mediated Degradation of Emerging Pollutants in Sewage Sludge... 

Keywords Biodegradation, Emerging pollutants, Sewage sludge, Trametes versicolor, White-rot fungi... 

The next sections discuss the removal of several groups of emerging pollutants at pre-existent concentrations from sewage sludge by means of fungal treatments in solid-phase biopiles, both under sterile and non-sterile conditions and in bioslurry reactors under sterile conditions. 

Table 1 Occurrence and removal of emerging pollutants in thermally dehydrated sewage sludge after solid-phase treatment with T. versicolor... 

Fig. 3 Comparison of solid-phase biopiles (black bars) and bioslurry reactor (gray bars) in the removal of several emerging pollutants from sewage sludge with T. versicolor. Only compounds found during both kinds of treatment are included...

Before achieving the development of an industrial scale process, the research must follow different stages. First of all, the researchers have as an objective to demonstrate that the WRF are capable of degrading different families of emerging pollutants. Most of the studies have been carried out in liquid media, and a review is presented in Chaps. 6, 7, and 8. 

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