New evidence of accelerated elimination of an emergent water pollutant by TiO2 assisted photo-oxidation

Over the past few years, the presence of the pharmaceuticals and their metabolites in the aquatic environment has become an important public health issue. These molecules are generally released in the aquatic ecosystem through the effluents of conventional wastewater treatment plants which were not designed to treat such kind of pollution. Thus, new efficient strategies are needed for their efficient elimination. This study focuses on the photocatalytic degradation of pharmaceutic compound essentially employed for the treatment of hypertension using TiO2 as catalyst and UVA irradiation. An efficient elimination of 95% was obtained after 10 minutes of irradiation at initial pollutant concentration of 6 mg/L and 1.2 g/L of catalyst. A higher mineralization yield of 87% was reached in 2h of reaction. Results showed that under all studied process conditions the target molecule was degraded according to a pseudo first order kinetics. Obtained data clearly demonstrate the potential application of the investigated process for the remediation of polluted water.