Treatment of Liquid Waste Loaded with Pharmaceutical Products: A Case of Antibiotics

The presence of pharmaceutical compounds (PCs) in aqueous systems poses a significant threat to ecological systems. Additionally, antibiotic contamination poses a risk to microbial communities and human health. If antibiotic-resistant bacteria develop, this could lead to an increase in multi-resistant bacterial infections in the coming days and have serious consequences for human health, ecosystems and the environment. One of the most prospective approaches consists of combining biological and physicochemical methods to treat these effluents. Accordingly, hybrid systems must be fabricated by mixing biological and physicochemical methods. In some cases, these hybrid processes help improve pharmaceutical disposal performance by overcoming each disadvantage of one method over the other. They appear to be a potential means of reducing the impact of pharmaceutical emissions on the environment, ecosystems, wastewater treatment plants and public health. This is about better and more sustainable management of this complex environmental issue.