Pharmaceutical wastewater management

Pharmaceutical compounds have always been a foundation for supporting the quality of life. The advanced research in the field of pharmaceutics has been evaluating the allurement for the production and exploitation of these compounds. Complete metabolization of some of the compounds is impractical for the human body, and these unmetabolized compounds are excreted in the wastewater. Moreover, with the failure of conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTs), these emerging micropollutants are found to contort water quality and indoctrinate toxic effects on living organisms, leading to the need for more efficient, advanced, and sustainable wastewater treatment systems. Nowadays, green development refers to effective biological treatment (secondary treatment) that occurs after physical treatment (primary treatment), which is preceded by chemical treatment processes (tertiary treatment process). Strategies against wastewater effluents generated from pharmaceuticals mainly include bioremediation by erobic and anaerobic treatments, phytoremediation, microembolization, chemical precipitation and coagulation, etc. The present chapter highlights the effective removal of pharmaceutical contaminants using physicochemical, chemical, and biological methods alone or in combination. Furthermore, we have also circumscribed the various emerging technologies, such as clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPRs), and their future perspectives in wastewater management. In addition, this chapter addressed the global concern about the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in hospital wastewater and its removal by existing treatment facilities.