Removal of antibiotics from wastewater by advanced oxidation technologies

Antibiotics are substances that inhibit the growth of microorganisms and are widely used in modern medicine. High consumption of antibiotics correlates with their elevated occurence in sewage systems, from where they are further released into the environment. The threat of their occurrence in the environment is in triggering the formation and spread of antibiotic resistance. This thesis focuses on the removal of selected antibiotics and partly on the antibiotic resistance from wastewater by advanced oxidation processes (AOPs). AOPs are based on the creation of highly reactive hydroxyl radicals, which are able to oxidize even highly persistent substances. The thesis focuses on the purification of effluents from municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTP), which are identified as the main source of pharmaceutical pollution in the environment, by AOPs mainly based on ozonation. These processes were tested under laboratory conditions on model water as well as under real conditions as the tertiary stage of the treatment at Brno-Modřice WWTP under various operating states. As the results of the performed experiments show, it could be concluded that the studied AOPs are capable of effective degradation of studied antibiotics from the treated medium. Under real conditions, the antibiotics sulfamethoxazole, trimethoprim, azithromycin and clarithromycin were monitored. Output concentrations in each operational state were achieved to be below the limit of detection for all four antibiotics. The application of AOPs based on ozonation as the tertiary step of the treatment also had a positive effect on the reduction of microbial contamination and antibiotic resistance. Within the pilot plant experiments, a reduction of up to 4 orders of magnitude of E.coli, coliform microorganisms and a reduction of their resistant strains in the range of 1.4 - 4.0 logs were observed, compared to the effluent from the WWTP