Pharmaceuticals used for human treatment have been detected in rivers around the world (Wilkinson et al., 2022). After administration, a fraction of the pharmaceutical is excreted, enters the sewage system, passes the waste water treatment (if present) and reaches the aquatic environment. Once in the freshwater system, pharmaceuticals can cause ecotoxicological effects on flora and fauna, increase resistances or enter drinking water and the food chain (Boxall et al., 2022). While emissions’ existence and their effects are known, studies modelling pharmaceutical emissions at large geographical scale with high spatial resolution remain sparce (one of the few examples: Oldenkamp et al. (2019)). Moreover, there is usually no emphasis on temporal patterns of pharmaceutical emissions. While processes about the human pharmaceuticals’ pathways to water are reasonably well understood and have been modeled for different regions across the globe (Lämmchen et al., 2021, Lindim et al., 2016, Zhu et al., 2019), the bottleneck for global assessments are the absent pharmaceutical use data. This should be addressed in this project by using measured pharmaceutical concentrations in waste water as a proxy for pharmaceutical emissions from human use.
Objective
Estimate the global historic annual grey water footprint of human pharmaceuticals using sewage effluents as a proxy to estimate pharmaceutical consumption.
Method
- Analyze the database pharmaceuticals in the environment by filtering for measurements in sewage and waste water treatment influent, data availability for substances and years
- Research respective flow rate/discharges for concentrations provided in the database
- Potentially extend the database by a literature search for the years 2022 and beyond
- Use the sewage and influent concentrations from the database and divide it by flow rates to obtain mass loads; divide mass loads by connected people to estimate per capita loads of pharmaceuticals in the waste water (see Baz-Lomba et al. (2016))
- Based on datapoints available, extrapolate per capita loads to a global grid (ideally 5x5 arc min resolution) using population density data
- Model pharmaceutical’s pathway to freshwater and the related grey water footprint using the method outlined by Wöhler et al. (2020)
- Display results in a global map that indicates the degree of data availability to transparently indicate robustness of results
- Depending on the data robustness, analysis choices can be made, e.g. investigating grey water footprints across regions or developments over years
Expected results
Annual globally gridded maps displaying the grey water footprint of selected human pharmaceuticals.
References
Baz-Lomba, J. A., Salvatore, S., Gracia-Lor, E., Bade, R., Castiglioni, S., Castrignanò, E., Causanilles, A., Hernandez, F., Kasprzyk-Hordern, B., Kinyua, J., et al. 2016. Comparison of pharmaceutical, illicit drug, alcohol, nicotine and caffeine levels in wastewater with sale, seizure and consumption data for 8 European cities. BMC Public Health, 16, 1035, 10.1186/s12889-016-3686-5.
Boxall, A. B. A., Wilkinson, J. L. & Bouzas-Monroy, A. 2022. Medicating nature: Are human-use pharmaceuticals poisoning the environment? One Earth, 5, 1080-1084, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.09.009.
Lämmchen, V., Niebaum, G., Berlekamp, J. & Klasmeier, J. 2021. Geo-referenced simulation of pharmaceuticals in whole watersheds: application of GREAT-ER 4.1 in Germany. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 28, 21926-21935, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12189-7.
Lindim, C., Van Gils, J., Georgieva, D., Mekenyan, O. & Cousins, I. T. 2016. Evaluation of human pharmaceutical emissions and concentrations in Swedish river basins. Science of The Total Environment, 572, 508-519, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.08.074.
Oldenkamp, R., Beusen, A. H. W. & Huijbregts, M. a. J. 2019. Aquatic risks from human pharmaceuticals—modelling temporal trends of carbamazepine and ciprofloxacin at the global scale. Environmental Research Letters, 14, 034003, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab0071.
Wilkinson, J. L., Boxall, A. B. A., Kolpin, D. W., Leung, K. M. Y., Lai, R. W. S., Galbán-Malagón, C., Adell, A. D., Mondon, J., Metian, M., Marchant, R. A., et al. 2022. Pharmaceutical pollution of the world's rivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119, e2113947119, doi:10.1073/pnas.2113947119.
Wöhler, L., Niebaum, G., Krol, M. & Hoekstra, A. Y. 2020. The grey water footprint of human and veterinary pharmaceuticals. Water Research X, 7, 100044, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wroa.2020.100044.
Zhu, Y., Snape, J., Jones, K. & Sweetman, A. 2019. Spatially Explicit Large-Scale Environmental Risk Assessment of Pharmaceuticals in Surface Water in China. Environmental Science & Technology, 53, 2559-2569, 10.1021/acs.est.8b07054.
Supervision
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