Pharmaceuticals, personal care products, hormones, and wastewater products are identified as emerging environmental concerns because of their potential for endocrine disruption at a very low chronic exposure level. Recently, much research has been conducted on the environmental occurrences of these emerging contaminants in water, soil, sediment and biota in Europe and the United States. However, it is challenging to compare reported data due to differences in the sampled environments and targeted analytes. This work reports on the fate of 30 compounds listed in the National Reconnaissance of the United States Geological Survey as those most frequently detected organic wastewater contaminants in U.S. streams and rivers. The so-called USGS 30 include pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, organic wastewater metabolites and estrogenic compounds.

Probabilistic fate of the environmental concentrations of the USGS 30 was carried out using Level I and II fugacity modeling. The USGS 30 chemicals can be categorized into three groups based upon the sensitivity of their predicted surface water concentrations to uncertainties in their physicochemical input parameters. It is observed that for one of these groups, conventional treatment strategies such as air stripping or adsorption on granular activated carbon are unsuitable for their removal from wastewater, as many of the USGS 30 compounds exhibit physical and chemical properties that depart significantly from those of traditional “Superfund chemicals” such as halogenated solvents and persistent organic pollutants (POPs).

A Level III fugacity model was also applied to the analysis of the fate and loss pathways of a subset of 17 of the USGS 30 chemicals that were detected in the influent to the Ann Arbor municipal wastewater treatment plant. Although significant (i.e. > 90%) reduction in the concentrations of the 13 of the compounds was achieved as a result of primary and secondary treatment operations, 15 of the 17 compounds were nonetheless detected in varying concentrations in the effluent discharged from the treatment facility to the receiving waters.