Faculty of Biological Sciences, Department Aquatic Ecotoxicology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Max-von-Laue-Str. 13, 60438, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2018 Feb;25(5):3965-3976. doi: 10.1007/s11356-016-7540-1. Epub 2016 Sep 6.
Conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) have a limited capacity to eliminate micropollutants. One option to improve this is tertiary treatment. Accordingly, the WWTP Eriskirch at the German river Schussen has been upgraded with different combinations of ozonation, sand, and granulated activated carbon filtration. In this study, the removal of endocrine and genotoxic effects in vitro and reproductive toxicity in vivo was assessed in a 2-year long-term monitoring. All experiments were performed with aqueous and solid-phase extracted water samples. Untreated wastewater affected several endocrine endpoints in reporter gene assays. The conventional treatment removed the estrogenic and androgenic activity by 77 and 95 %, respectively. Nevertheless, high anti-estrogenic activities and reproductive toxicity persisted. All advanced treatment technologies further reduced the estrogenic activities by additional 69-86 % compared to conventional treatment, resulting in a complete removal of up to 97 %. In the Ames assay, we detected an ozone-induced mutagenicity, which was removed by subsequent filtration. This demonstrates that a post treatment to ozonation is needed to minimize toxic oxidative transformation products. In the reproduction test with the mudsnail Potamopyrgus antipodarum, a decreased number of embryos was observed for all wastewater samples. This indicates that reproductive toxicants were eliminated by neither the conventional nor the advanced treatment. Furthermore, aqueous samples showed higher anti-estrogenic and reproductive toxicity than extracted samples, indicating that the causative compounds are not extractable or were lost during extraction. This underlines the importance of the adequate handling of wastewater samples. Taken together, this study demonstrates that combinations of multiple advanced technologies reduce endocrine effects in vitro. However, they did not remove in vitro anti-estrogenicity and in vivo reproductive toxicity. This implies that a further optimization of advanced wastewater treatment is needed that goes beyond combining available technologies.
传统的废水处理厂（WWTP）去除微污染物的能力有限。一种改进方法是采用三级处理。因此，德国舒森河的 Eriskirch WWTP 采用臭氧、砂和颗粒活性炭过滤的不同组合进行了升级。在这项为期两年的长期监测研究中，评估了体外去除内分泌和遗传毒性以及体内生殖毒性的效果。所有实验均使用水相和固相萃取水样进行。未经处理的废水会影响报告基因检测中的几种内分泌终点。常规处理可分别去除 77%和 95%的雌激素和雄激素活性。然而，仍存在高抗雌激素活性和生殖毒性。与常规处理相比，所有先进的处理技术可进一步将雌激素活性降低 69-86%，从而使去除率高达 97%。在艾姆斯试验中，我们检测到臭氧诱导的致突变性，随后的过滤可去除该致突变性。这表明需要对臭氧处理进行后处理，以最大限度地减少有毒氧化转化产物。在与泥螺 Potamopyrgus antipodarum 的繁殖试验中，所有废水样品的胚胎数量均减少。这表明常规处理和先进处理均未去除生殖毒物。此外，水样的抗雌激素和生殖毒性均高于萃取样品，表明潜在的致毒化合物不可萃取或在萃取过程中丢失。这强调了适当处理废水样品的重要性。综上所述，本研究表明，多种先进技术的组合可降低体外的内分泌效应。然而，它们并未去除体外抗雌激素活性和体内生殖毒性。这意味着需要进一步优化先进的废水处理，超越现有技术的组合。
