College of Environmental and Energy Engineering, Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture, Beijing, 100044, China; State Key Laboratory of Environmental Aquatic Chemistry, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences (RCEES), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China.
College of Environmental and Energy Engineering, Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture, Beijing, 100044, China.
Environ Pollut. 2024 Dec 15;363(Pt 2):125201. doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2024.125201. Epub 2024 Oct 28.
The presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in surface water has been widely reported in recent years. Many techniques, e.g., adsorption, have been investigated to remove PFAS from contaminated waters. However, the underlying impacts of PFAS on conventional drinking water treatment have been overlooked so far. In this study, we hypothesized whether PFAS have significant impacts on algae in surface water, which in turn may influence the performance of typical treatment processes (e.g., coagulation/membrane filtration). Therefore, we sampled a representative surface water (drinking water source) in Beijing, China, and dosed 2 representative PFAS compounds, at environment concentrations, to conduct bench-scale treatment tests. Results showed that the presence of PFAS caused larger flocs during coagulation and more severe ultrafiltration (UF) membrane fouling, compared with a control solution without PFAS. Specifically, PFAS at a low concentration (0.1 μg/L) led to the greatest influence on floc growth and UF membrane fouling; compared with the solution without PFAS, the floc size increased by 1.6 times and membrane flux declined more than 10%. These effects were evidenced by the stress response of algae under PFAS stimulus, secreting more biopolymers (mainly polysaccharides), rather than by PFAS directly. Overall, this study has demonstrated that the presence of PFAS can have both beneficial, and undesirable, indirect effects on water treatment in real applications, through its impact on algae in surface water sources.
近年来，已广泛报道地表水存在全氟和多氟烷基物质（PFAS）。人们已经研究了许多技术，例如吸附，以从受污染的水中去除 PFAS。然而，迄今为止，PFAS 对常规饮用水处理的潜在影响尚未得到重视。在这项研究中，我们假设 PFAS 是否对地表水藻类有重大影响，进而可能影响典型处理过程（例如混凝/膜过滤）的性能。因此，我们采集了中国北京有代表性的地表水（饮用水水源），并用环境浓度的 2 种代表性 PFAS 化合物进行了中试处理试验。结果表明，与不含 PFAS 的对照溶液相比，PFAS 的存在会导致混凝过程中形成更大的絮体，并导致超滤（UF）膜更严重的污染。具体而言，低浓度（0.1μg/L）的 PFAS 对絮体生长和 UF 膜污染的影响最大；与不含 PFAS 的溶液相比，絮体尺寸增加了 1.6 倍，膜通量下降了 10%以上。这些影响是由 PFAS 刺激下藻类的应激反应引起的，藻类会分泌更多的生物聚合物（主要是多糖），而不是 PFAS 本身。总的来说，这项研究表明，在实际应用中，PFAS 可以通过对地表水藻类的影响，对水处理产生有益和不良的间接影响。
