Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-15-2021
Department
Department of Biological Sciences
Abstract
Overuse of antibiotics has resulted in widespread contamination of the environment and triggered antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria. Conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are not equipped to remove antibiotics. Effluents from WWTPs are usually the primary source of antibiotics in aquatic environments. There is an urgent need for cost-effective, environment-friendly technologies to address this issue. Along with antibiotics, nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) are also present in conventional WWTP effluents at high concentrations, causing environmental problems like eutrophication. In this study, we tested vetiver grass in a plug flow reactor-based constructed wetland model in a greenhouse setup for removing antibiotics ciprofloxacin (CIP) and tetracycline (TTC), and nutrients, N and P, from secondary wastewater effluent. The constructed wetland was designed based on a previous batch reaction kinetics study and reached a steady-state in 7 days. The measured concentrations of antibiotics were generally consistent with the modeling predictions using first-order reaction kinetics. Vetiver grass significantly (p < 0.05) removed 93% and 97% of CIP and TTC (initial concentrations of 10 mg/L), simultaneously with 93% and 84% nitrogen and phosphorus, respectively. Results show that using vetiver grass in constructed wetlands could be a viable green technology for the removal of antibiotics and nutrients from wastewater.
Publication Title
Toxics
Recommended Citation
Panja, S.,
Sarkar, D.,
Zhang, Z.,
&
Datta, R.
(2021).
Removal of antibiotics and nutrients by vetiver grass (Chrysopogon zizanioides) from a plug flow reactor based constructed wetland model.
Toxics,
9(4).
http://doi.org/10.3390/toxics9040084
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/14890
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publisher's Statement
: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/toxics9040084