Ozonation and UV photolysis for removing anticancer drug residues from hospital wastewater

Abstract

The present study investigates the use of UV light and the ozone process for doxorubicin, daunorubicin, epirubicin, and irinotecan degradation. The process was carried out using different pH values in hospital wastewater. The use of UV radiation reduces the concentration of anticancer drugs, but in all cases, this technology was not able enough to remove on the whole these contaminants from hospital wastewater. The best condition was achieved when using pH 9 for most of the analytes. Doxorubicin, daunorubicin, and epirubicin were degraded at 97.3%, 88.3%, and 99.0%, respectively. Irinotecan showed the lowest degradation, just 55.6%; a slightly higher degradation (63.8%) was obtained when pH 5 was used. Complete removal of doxorubicin, daunorubicin, epirubicin, and irinotecan was achieved when ozone treatment was used for all the pH studied. The results indicated that UV light and the ozone process can be used as a tertiary treatment to reduce the concentration of anticancer drugs in the effluents. Ozonation, therefore, proved to be more efficient than the photolysis process, when considering the percentual degradation of the original compounds in shorter timespans.

Keywords:

• Anticancer drugs
• doxorubicin
• daunorubicin
• epirubicin
• irinotecan
• degradation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to the CNPq (Brazilian National Council of Technological and Scientific Development) and CAPES (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education) for their financial support and scholarships.

Conflict of interests

The authors have declared no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author at reasonable request.