Browsing by Author "Bojorque Palacios, Juliana Marcela"

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Evaluación de la eficiencia de absorción de vermifiltros para la remoción de ciprofloxacina
(Universidad de Cuenca, 2025-09-08) Bojorque Palacios, Juliana Marcela; Merchan Ordoñez, Karen Mabel; Guanuchi Quito, Alexandra Elizabeth
The existence of pollutants whose consequences are not directly detectable poses an environmental crisis. These are known as emerging pollutants. Drugs are among them, such as ciprofloxacin (CIP). This drug is absorbed in the intestinal tract, where 40% to 50% is not metabolized and is excreted as feces and urine, reaching wastewater that is treated inefficiently and nonspecifically. Therefore, vermifiltration is proposed, a technology based on the removal of contaminants by Eisenia foetida worms due to their bioactivity, rapid acclimatization, high reproductive capacity, and survival. These worms consume the drug, transforming 60% into humus and using the rest in cellular processes. The objective of this research is to evaluate the absorption efficiency of this technology for the removal of ciprofloxacin from water. Two laboratory-scale filters were constructed, one with worms (vermicomposting filter) and the other called a control or blank filter, to make comparisons between the two objects. The study will be carried out with synthetic domestic wastewater containing 2 ppm of the drug. Using solid-phase extraction (SPE) and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), a removal percentage of up to 97.99% of CIP was obtained, of which 3.5% was due to the effect of the worms, thus concluding that it is a viable method. However, further research is needed to explore greater results from the test organism.