Effects on wastewater due to new active pharmaceutical ingredients and products

Sammanfattning: Wastewater from pharmaceutical industries can sometimes contain substances that could cause complications in the receiving wastewater treatment plant. This master thesis is about a phar-maceutical company and the wastewater from it. The company (McNeil) will introduce new products, and this will result in new wastewater streams with unknown properties. It is crucial that the new streams do not cause complications in the receiving wastewater treatment plant and for this reason the new streams needed to be examined. Samples of the new streams were sent to an external laboratory that examined the properties of the water. The properties were: pH, BOD, COD, BOD/COD, phosphorus, nitrogen, toxici-ty and nitrification inhibition. The new streams were assessed based on different criteria. One was if the streams were within the permits and the other one was if the streams differed from previous wastewater and municipal wastewater. McNeil also needed to investigate the previous characteristics of their wastewater, so a compilation of previous measurements was carried out. The measured properties in the compi-lation were: pH, BOD, COD, BOD/COD, suspended materials, phosphorus and nitrogen. The historic streams from the company had levels that were in line with municipal wastewater for all parameters except for BOD and COD. Like the historic values, the new wastewater streams were in line with all parameters except for BOD and COD. However, the levels of BOD and COD were lower compared to previous streams from the company. The examined streams were from different parts of the production and a total of 10 samples were collected. Some samples were assumed to have the same properties, these samples came from a process with parallel tanks. Streams that came from steps that corresponded with each other in the parallel tanks were assumed to have the same properties since the steps were iden-tical but loaded in different tanks. It seemed that the streams that contained low amounts of detergent showed less toxic and inhibitory properties. In contrast, streams that contained high amounts of detergent showed high toxicity and high inhibitory properties. Consequently, it seemed that traces of pharma-ceutical products in the wastewater were not the issue, but rather the detergents. All streams that do not contain significant amounts of detergent could be sent to the receiving wastewater treatment plant, but the detergent streams must be handled. The problematic streams can be dealt with an end-of-pipe solution or a proactive solution.