Evaluación de la remoción de fármacos por biosorción en aguas residuales

Abstract

The medicines, used to improve the quality of life of living beings, are eliminated through excretion reaching the wastewater, these don’t have a good removal in the wastewater treatment plants, so that, in their discharge they arrive to aquatic ecosystems causing biocidal effects on microbial and plant populations, this environmental problem appears because most wastewater treatment plants are not designed for efficient removal of these emerging pollutants. This work used biosorption to remove the drugs ciprofloxacin and sulfamethoxazole in treated wastewater (ART), using sugarcane bagasse and corn cob as adsorbent. The parameters of interest were the adsorbent, temperature, concentration of the solution and contact time, in addition to the kinetics and balance of the process. The results show that biomass is capable of removing drugs in treated wastewater but with less efficiency compared to distilled water. It was found that the process has a great dependence on time, reaching a high percentage of removal in the first 10 min. The temperature has little influence on the process, being ambient temperature favorable. The experimental data were adjusted to the kinetic model of Pseudo Second Order and to the equilibrium models of Freundlich and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), which indicates that it’s a non-specific multilayer adsorption on the surface of the adsorbent, indicating that the adsorption process of the two drugs in wastewater on plant waste is favorable.