Bayesian estimation of seasonal and between year variability of norovirus infection risks for workers in agricultural water reuse using epidemiological data.

Norovirus infections are among the major causes of acute gastroenteritis worldwide. In Germany, norovirus infections are the most frequently reported cause of gastroenteritis, although only laboratory confirmed cases are officially counted. The high infectivity and environmental persistence of norovirus, makes the virus a relevant pathogen for water related infections. In the 2017 guidelines for potable water reuse, the World Health Organization proposes Norovirus as a reference pathogen for viral pathogens for quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA). A challenge for QMRA is, that norovirus data are rarely available over long monitoring periods to assess inter-annual variability of the associated health risk, raising the question about the relevance of this source of variability regarding potential risk management alternatives. Moreover, norovirus infections show high prevalence during winter and early spring and lower incidence during summer. Therefore, our objective is to derive risk scenarios for assessing the potential relevance of the within and between year variability of norovirus concentrations in municipal wastewater for the assessment of health risks of fieldworkers, if treated wastewater is used for irrigation in agriculture. To this end, we use the correlation between norovirus influent concentration and reported epidemiological incidence (R²=0.93), found at a large city in Germany. Risk scenarios are subsequently derived from long-term reported epidemiological data, by applying a Bayesian regression approach. For assessing the practical relevance for wastewater reuse we apply the risk scenarios to different irrigation patterns under various treatment options, namely "status-quo" and "irrigation on demand". While status-quo refers to an almost all-year irrigation, the latter assumes that irrigation only takes place during the vegetation period from May - September. Our results indicate that the log-difference of infection risks between scenarios may vary between 0.8 and 1.7 log given the same level of pre-treatment. They also indicate that under the same exposure scenario the between-year variability of norovirus infection risk may be > 1log, which makes it a relevant factor to consider in future QMRA studies and studies which aim at evaluating safe water reuse applications. The predictive power and wider use of epidemiological data as a suitable predictor variable should be further validated with paired multi-year data.

Removal of pharmaceutical metabolites in wastewater ozonation including their fate in different post-treatments.

Advanced treatment technologies for the removal of pharmaceuticals and other organic micropollutants in WWTPs primarily target the removal of parent compounds. Nevertheless, the removal of metabolites originating from human- or microbial metabolism during biological treatment needs comparable consideration, as some of them might be present in high concentrations and contribute to toxicity. This study was conducted to elucidate the removal of human and microbial metabolites of pharmaceuticals as a function of the specific ozone dose. Ozonation was performed on four sites with two pilot- and two full-scale plants operated downstream of conventional activated sludge plants. The ozone reactivity of all metabolites (expressed as the ozone dose to remove 90% of the compound/decadic ozone dose) was lower than those of their parent compounds. The decadic ozone dose was 1.0, 1.3 and 1.1 mg O3/mg DOC for Epoxy-carbamazepine, Di-OH-carbamazepine and N-Desmethyl tramadol, respectively. 20-40% of the remaining metabolites were removed in a polishing sand/BAC-filter (biological activated carbon). Similar removal was observed for Epoxy-carbamazepine, Di-OH-carbamazepine and Hydroxy-diclofenac in a constructed wetland. However, the sand/anthracite filter had no effect. All four metabolites were removed in a GAC (granulated activated carbon) filter.

Ozone dose dependent formation and removal of ozonation products of pharmaceuticals in pilot and full-scale municipal wastewater treatment plants.

The removal of micropollutants from municipal wastewater is challenged by the number of compounds with diverse physico-chemical properties. Ozonation is increasingly used to remove micropollutants from wastewater. However, ozonation does not necessarily result in complete mineralization of the organic micropollutants but rather transforms them into new compounds which could be persistent or have adverse environmental effects. To explore ozone dose dependency of the formation and successive removal of ozonation products, two pilot-scale and one full-scale ozonation plants were operated subsequent to a conventional activated sludge treatment. The results from these trials indicated that the concentrations of several N-oxides, such as Erythromycin N-oxide, Venlafaxine N-oxide and Tramadol N-oxide, increased up to an ozone dose of 0.56-0.61 mg O3/mg DOC while they decreased at elevated doses of 0.7-1.0 mg O3/mg DOC. Similar results were also obtained for two transformation products of Diclofenac (Diclofenac 2,5-quinone imine and 1-(2,6-dichlorophenyl)indolin-2,3-dione) and one transformation product of Carbamazepine (1-(2-benzoic acid)-(1H,3H)-quinazoline-2,4-dione), where the highest concentrations appeared around 0.27-0.31 mg O3/mg DOC. The formation maximum of a given compound occurred at a specific ozone dose that is characteristic for each compound, but seemed to be independent of the wastewater used for the experiments at the two pilots and the full-scale plant.

Systematic Review of Toxicity Removal by Advanced Wastewater Treatment Technologies via Ozonation and Activated Carbon.

Upgrading wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) with advanced technologies is one key strategy to reduce micropollutant emissions. Given the complex chemical composition of wastewater, toxicity removal is an integral parameter to assess the performance of WWTPs. Thus, the goal of this systematic review is to evaluate how effectively ozonation and activated carbon remove in vitro and in vivo toxicity. Out of 2464 publications, we extracted 46 relevant studies conducted at 22 pilot or full-scale WWTPs. We performed a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of in vitro (100 assays) and in vivo data (20 species), respectively. Data is more abundant on ozonation (573 data points) than on an activated carbon treatment (162 data points), and certain in vitro end points (especially estrogenicity) and in vivo models (e.g., daphnids) dominate. The literature shows that while a conventional treatment effectively reduces toxicity, residual effects in the effluents may represent a risk to the receiving ecosystem on the basis of effect-based trigger values. In general, an upgrade to ozonation or activated carbon treatment will significantly increase toxicity removal with similar performance. Nevertheless, ozonation generates toxic transformation products that can be removed by a post-treatment. By assessing the growing body of effect-based studies, we identify sensitive and underrepresented end points and species and provide guidance for future research.

Application of online UV absorption measurements for ozone process control in secondary effluent with variable nitrite concentration.

Ozone process control in secondary effluent used for elimination of trace organic compounds (TrOCs) requires the use of surrogates, such as the relative reduction of UV absorption at 254 nm (ΔUVA254) to adapt the ozone dose to a varying water quality. In the present study, a closed-loop process control based on two online UVA254 measurements was successfully implemented and tested under realistic conditions with ozone doses from 0.2 to 1.05 mg-O3/mg-DOC at a pilot scale ozonation system with subsequent coagulation filtration at a municipal wastewater treatment plant (DOC âˆ¼ 13 mg/L, UVA254 âˆ¼ 27 m-1, and nitrite peaks of up to 1.6 mg-N/L). It could be shown that measuring the UVA254 at the ozonation effluent was superior to the measurement of UVA254 at the filter effluent in terms of response time due to changes in water quality, whereas online measurement at the filter effluent showed a better agreement with laboratory data and a reduced maintenance interval due to less particles. Additional online nitrite measurement is not necessary as the ozone consumption by nitrite directly impacts ΔUVA254.

Selection of organic process and source indicator substances for the anthropogenically influenced water cycle.

An increasing number of organic micropollutants (OMP) is detected in anthropogenically influenced water cycles. Source control and effective natural and technical barriers are essential to maintain a high quality of drinking water resources under these circumstances. Based on the literature and our own research this study proposes a limited number of OMP that can serve as indicator substances for the major sources of OMP, such as wastewater treatment plants, agriculture and surface runoff. Furthermore functional indicators are proposed that allow assessment of the proper function of natural and technical barriers in the aquatic environment, namely conventional municipal wastewater treatment, advanced treatment (ozonation, activated carbon), bank filtration and soil aquifer treatment as well as self-purification in surface water. These indicator substances include the artificial sweetener acesulfame, the anti-inflammatory drug ibuprofen, the anticonvulsant carbamazepine, the corrosion inhibitor benzotriazole and the herbicide mecoprop among others. The chemical indicator substances are intended to support comparisons between watersheds and technical and natural processes independent of specific water cycles and to reduce efforts and costs of chemical analyses without losing essential information.

The effect of pre-ozonation and subsequent coagulation on the filtration of WWTP effluent with low-pressure membranes.

The impact of a pre-treatment by pre-ozonation (2-10 mg O3/L) and subsequent coagulation (FeCl3: 2-6 mg Fe3+/L) on the performance of a polymeric ultrafiltration membrane was investigated in lab scale. The performance was assessed by monitoring the flux decline during filtration of secondary effluent in Amicon test cells. During the filtration process no free dissolved ozone was in contact with the membrane. It was observed that flux decline is reduced with increasing coagulant concentration as well as with increasing ozone dosage. This effect involves a reduction in the amount of biopolymers measured by size exclusion chromatography (LC-OCD). Moreover, multi-filtration cycles revealed that pre-ozonation leads to a significant increase in irreversible fouling that might be caused by increasing colloidal iron concentrations. Phosphorus in the permeate was successfully reduced to concentrations < 60 microg/L.

Polar pollutants in municipal wastewater and the water cycle: occurrence and removal of benzotriazoles.

1H-benzo-1,2,3-triazole (BTri) and its methylated analogues (tolyltriazole, TTri) are corrosion inhibitors used in many industrial applications, but also in households in dishwashing agents and in deicing fluids at airports and elsewhere. BTri and one of the TTri-isomers (4-TTri) are typical examples of polar and poorly degradable trace pollutants. Benzotriazole elimination in four wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) in Berlin ranged from 20 to 70% for 5-TTRi over 30 to 55% for BTri to insignificant for 4-TTri. WWTP effluent concentrations were in the range of 7-18 microg/L of BTri, 1-5 microg/L of 4-TTri and 0.8-1.2 microg/L of 5-TTri. BTri and 4-TTri proved to be omnipresent in surface waters of the rivers Rhine and Elbe with concentrations increasing from <0.05 microg/L to around 0.5 microg/L of BTri and 0.2-0.5 microg/L of 4-TTri over 600-700 km. Bank filtration is an important process to generate raw water for drinking water production from surface waters. Even after residence times of several months BTri and 4-TTri were determined in concentrations of a few hundred ng/L in bank filtration water. Isotherm data from batch experiments indicate that activated carbon filtration should be suitable to avoid intrusion of TTri into drinking water in partially closed water cycles. For BTri, however, sorption to activated carbon appears to be too weak and ozonation may be mandatory to remove it from raw waters.