Treatment of Pharmaceutical Waste with Special Emphasis to Treatment Processes - A Review

Recently, the major area of concern is the presence of the emerging pollutants in wastewaters, surface waters and ground waters. In most cases, the emerging contaminants refers to the unregulated pollutants, which can be included for future regulation depending upon research on their health effects and their occurrence. They generally includes surfactants, illicit drugs, endocrine disruptors, pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), gasoline additives and many other groups of compounds. The presence of endocrine disruptors and pharmaceutical residues in the wastewater poses a great threat for the humans if not treated. Pharmaceutical wastes are introduced into the environment through hospitals, veterinary clinics, pharmaceutical industry effluents, and household effluents. Among these pharmaceutical wastes antibiotics poses to be of great threat. So to eliminate these unwanted pollutants from environment that can potentially cause many deleterious effects to human health, many treatment processes are employed to make sure the water released is antibiotic free. The methods include activated sludge treatment, activated carbon columns, ion exchange columns, membrane processes are to mention a few. This paper deals with few treatment processes that could effectively, in an environmental sustainable manner, could remediate the pollution load in the pharmaceutical waste water.