Search

There was an investigation into the removal of 6 types of antibiotics from hospital wastewater through membrane bioreactor (MBR) treatment and ozonation processes. Six types of antibiotics, namely, Sulfamethoxazole (SMZ), Norfloxacin (NOR), Ciprofloxacin (CIP), Ofloxacin (OFL), Erythromycin (ERY), and Vancomycin (VAN) which had high detection frequencies in collected samples from hospital wastewater treatment plant (HWTPs). After MBR treatment, the removal efficiencies of SMZ, NOR, OFL, and ERY were 45%, 25%, 30%, and 16%, respectively. Among of them, almost no elimination was observed for CIP and VAN since their concentrations increased by 0.24 ± 0.18 (μg·l-1) and 0.83 ± 0.20 (μg·l-1), respectively. Then, residues of the antibiotics were removed from the MBR effluent by the ozonation process. The overall removal efficiencies of SMZ, NOR, CIP, OFL, ERY, and VAN were approximately 66 %, 88 %, 83 %, 80 %, 93 %, and 92 %, respectively. The reason might be depended on different ozone consumption of those antibiotics (ABS) in a range of 313 to 1681 μg ABS·gO--1. Consequently, the ozonation process performed better in the antibiotics removal (e.g. CIP and VAN) so ozonation could be considered as important support for the MBR treatment to reduce the risk of antibiotic residues.

Antibiotic residues in the environment and their potential toxic effects have been considered as one of the emerging research area in the environmental field. Their continuous introduction in our environment may increase their negative impacts on human health. In this study, the eliminations of antibiotic such as Norfloxacin (NOR), Ciprofloxacin (CIP), Ofloxacin (OFL) and Sulfamethoxazole (SMZ) in wastewater of hospital were processed by membrane bioreactor (MBR) coupled with ozonation process. In particular, the MBR was applied for the antibiotic removals followed by ozonation process as a post-treatment stage to create an adequate integration to enhance removal efficiency. Achieved results after MBR treatment showed that the removal efficiency of NOR, CIP, OFL and SMZ were 90 ± 4.0% , 83 ± 13% , 81 ± 13 % and 39 ± 6%, respectivley. In addition, those antibiotic matters were continously removed by ozonation process with the removal efficiency of 87±9.0% , 83±1.0% , 81±2.3% and 66±2.3% for NOR, CIP, OFL and SMZ, respectively. In summary, antibiotics could be basically limited by the combination of MBR and ozonation before discharging in aquatic environment.