Wastewater as complex system of chemicals and their biological impacts

Abstract

Today, effluents from municipal wastewater treatment plants are utilized as an alternative water source in some cities of US, Asia, Europe, and Africa. However, wastewater effluents are also recognized as a source of numerous chemicals such as pharmaceuticals, personal care products, antibiotics, and pesticides. In addition, the wastewater effluent matrix is assumed to be more chemically complicated than pure pharmaceutical mixtures since it contains not only anthropogenic micropollutants but also soluble microbial products (SMP), metabolites/transformation products produced during treatment processes, and natural organic matters (NOM) derived from tap water. This review first overviews the complexity of wastewater as a chemical mixture system, and then, introduce previous findings on the biological impacts of wastewater samples, particularly those revealed by the application of toxicogenomic tools to the environmental and mixture samples. Finally, recent challenges to characterize the major origin of effluent-derived toxicity were presented. This review highlights the importance of prioritizing the pollutants for efficient control and monitoring of water quality under the limited human and financial resources.