Michael K. Musey, Aiguo Liu, and Ramble O. Ankumah. Tuskegee University, Dept. of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences, Tuskegee, AL 36088
One large class of chemicals, which until recently has received little or no attention, as potential environmental pollutants are the pharmaceutical compounds. Previously, no serious considerations were placed on the fate of pharmaceuticals in the environment. After therapeutic use, these compounds are excreted in combinations of metabolized and unmetabolized forms, which end up in the wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). According to available data, pharmaceuticals have about a 60% removal rate from the treated wastewater. Is the removed portion from the treated wastewater biodegraded or adsorbed to the sludge? If sorption to sewage sludge is a major removal pathway from the effluent, then the land application of biosolids represents an important route for human used pharmaceuticals to enter into the environment. To forestall or control the release of pharmaceutical compounds into the environment, it is important to determine the partition into solid and liquid phase during the wastewater treatment process. Two commonly used antibiotics, ciprofloxacin and amoxicillin were used in the study. Widely used reverse phase mobile phases were tried in various combinations to determine which could produce the most distinct peaks in ug/l-ng/l range. Samples of synthetic wastewater spiked with the pharmaceuticals were extracted with using ENVI-18 cartridges that were subsequently eluted by methanol and recoveries quantified.
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