Ozonation of hospital raw wastewaters for cytostatic compounds removal. Kinetic modelling and economic assessment of the process

[EN] The kinetics of the ozone consumption for the pretreatment of hospital wastewater has been analysed in order to determine the reaction rate coefficients between the ozone and the readily oxidisabled organic matter and cytostatic compounds. The wastewater from a medium size hospital was treated with ozone and peroxone methodologies, varying the ozone concentration, the reaction time and the hydrogen peroxide doses. The analysis shows that there are four cytostatic compounds, i.e. irinotecan, ifosfamide, cyclophosphamide and capecitabine, detected in the wastewaters and they are completely removed with reasonably short times after the ozone treatment. Considering the reactor geometry, the gas hydrodynamics, the mass transfer of ozone from gas to liquid and the reaction of all oxidisable compounds of the wastewater it is possible to determine the chemical ozone demand, COzD, of the sample as 256 mg O-3 L-1 and the kinetic rate coefficient with the dissolved organic matter as 8.4 M (1) s(-1). The kinetic rate coefficient between the ozone and the cyclophosphamide is in the order of 34.7M(-1) s(-1) and higher for the other cytostatics. The direct economic cost of the treatment was evaluated considering this reaction kinetics and it is below 0.3 (sic)/m(3) under given circumstances. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
J. Ferre-Aracil acknowledges the support of the doctoral fellowship from the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV-PAID-FPI-2010-04). Y. Valcarcel acknowledges the financial support provided by the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness, through the Carlos III Health Institute with the program "Projects on Health Research 2011-2012 FIS (PI11/00180)". N. Negreira, M. Lopez de Alda and D. Barcelo acknowledge the financial support by the EU through the EU FP7 projects CytoThreat (265264) and SOLUTIONS (603437), by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the project SCARCE (Consolider-Ingenio 2010 CSD2009-00065), and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Consolidated Research Groups "2014 SGR 418 - Water and Soil Quality Unit" and 2014 SGR 291 - ICRA). Merck is acknowledged for the gift of LC columns.