Psychiatric Pharmaceuticals As Emerging Contaminants in Wastewater

This book describes how psychiatric pharmaceuticals, namely antidepressants, anxiolytics, sedatives and hypnotics are among the most prescribed active substances due to the higher occurrence of psychiatric disorders throughout the world. It goes on to demonstrate how patients’ excretion of the active compounds along with several metabolites is considered to be the main pathway for the occurrence of these emerging pollutants in wastewater treatment plant effluents, surface and drinking water, soils and sediments. Further chapters are devoted to an exploration of these pharmaceuticals’ high persistence, toxicity and intrinsic biological activity, which can affect the nervous and endocrine systems of terrestrial and aquatic non-target organisms, the dissemination of these compounds in environment matrices and the growing number of associated problems and concerns. The remainder of the book describes how conventional wastewater treatment processes are generally inefficient when it comes to the removal of this type of pollutants, giving rise to the demand for implementing alternative or complementary treatment technologies. Extensive research studies on the efficiency of the degradation and/or removal of these pollutants are summarized, and adsorption, membrane and advanced oxidation processes (AOP) are proposed. Given its content and structure, the book offers a concise summary of the most significant findings on psychiatric pharmaceutical removal in wastewater.

Bruna Silva defended her PhD thesis (2012) in Chemical and Biological Engineering at University of Minho, under the supervision of Prof. Teresa Tavares and Prof. Isabel C. Neves. Her PhD research covered the preparation and characterization of new environmental catalysts by reutilization of metallic residues. She is a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre of Biological Engineering and her research interests are focused on environmental biotechnology, wastewater treatment, design of new catalytic materials for environmental sustainability and characterization of nanostructured materials. Bruna Silva published 16 papers in international scientific periodicals with peer reviewing and 4 papers in conference proceedings.

Filomena Costa completed the graduation (2008) in Applied Biology at University of Minho. In 2010, she defended her Master thesis in Chemical and Biological Engineering at University of Minho, under the supervision of Prof. Teresa Tavares. Her research activity is on the biodegradation of organic compounds using different microorganisms. At present, she is a doctoral student at the Centre of Biological Engineering. Her research interests are focused on environmental biotechnology, wastewater treatment, molecular biology. Filomena Costa published 4 papers in international scientific periodicals and presented 3 oral communications and 2 posters.

Isabel Correia Neves was born in Coimbra, Portugal, and graduated in Chemistry at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1987. She completed her Master degree in 1989 at the Instituto Superior Tecnico, in Lisboa. She received her doctorate from the University of Poitiers (1993) under supervision of Prof. M. Guisnet in the zeolites field. She initiated her career at University of Minho, Portugal, as Assistant Professor in 1998 and joined the Centre of Chemistry as Senior Researcher (CQ-UM) in 2000. She co-authored over 70 papers, most of them dealing with the application of zeolites as catalysts and as hosts of compound guests. Her main current interests are in heterogeneous catalysis and the development of the materials based in zeolites for health applications.

Teresa Tavares was born in Porto and graduated in Chemical Engineering at University of Porto, Portugal, in 1982. She worked in the national petrochemical company in aromatic production and in the meanwhile defended her PhD thesis in 1991, at University of Minho, on bi-metallic catalysts applied to syngas production. Since then, she has been working in bioremediation, biosorption and environmental catalysis research. At present, she is an associate professor at Biological Engineering Department, at University of Minho, and a senior researcher at Centre of Biological Engineering. She supervised circa 30 master theses and 8 PhD theses. She published around 70 papers in international journals and had more than 100 communications in international conferences. She has been collaborating with Isabel Neves and together they were awarded the 2007 National Environmental Innovation Prize.