As the world’s population is growing and ageing, the incidence of some diseases has increased considerably, and more people can afford medical treatment, as the figures of yearly employed cytostatic drugs (CDs) demonstrate. Hence, the demand for CDs is expected to more than double over the next 10 years. Nowadays, European hospitals typically use 50 different active substances to treat oncology patients. The occurrence of different CDs at lower levels varying from ng L−1 to μg L−1 (e.g. up to 146 ng L-1 for Cyclophosphamide and up to 200 ng L-1 for Tamoxifen) has been reported in different hospital effluents and urban WWTP in EU.
Nowadays, the sewage plants do not have the capacity to completely clean water from recalcitrant CDs. Additional steps for cleaning sewage water means more energy, chemicals and higher costs. Such situation, currently, means opt out for the release of sewage directly out into various surface waters like rivers, lakes, streams, or open sea without an appropriate treatment that guarantees the absence of CDs. Traditional end-of-pipe solutions dealing with the effluents coming out of these plants have being gradually replaced by an increasingly decentralized approach to treat wastewater streams in the most effective and economically sound way. Moreover, additional goals like reducing overall effluent emissions and water footprint by reusing treated wastewater towards zero-discharge strategies or minimizing waste generation and disposal costs by implementing a modular design approach have been gradually incorporated to a growingly holistic water and wastewater management approach.
Accordingly, detection, monitoring, and characterization at global scale of CDs content in drinking and surface water, animals and plants is necessary to understand the magnitude of the problem. In this context, the first step is to recognize CDs as an emerging concern requiring investing the necessary human and financial resources to properly characterize the specific polluted water. This process is the key to decide the related water treatment, including either the removal of CDs or the possible recovery that will contribute to both pollution removal and effluent valorization. This late aspect is nowadays a hot goal since reuse of CDs will avoid the difficulties of their destruction and will provide a needed financial support for water treatment process through an efficient and cost-effective processes of treating wastewater.
RECOPHARMA designed, developed, validated and demonstrated a novel process by sequential integration of the potentials offered by Molecular Imprinted Polymers (MIPs), Reagentless Thermosorption (RTS), Nanocomposites Functional Materials (NFMs) and Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOP) for an effective treatment aiming the recovery of target recalcitrant CDs and degradation of corresponding transformation products or metabolites, working in a continuous operation mode.
