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Removal of nanoplastics by a conventional drinking water treatment plant

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Nanoplastics have become a major concern due to their presence in water compartments used to produce drinking water, and their impact on public health.  This study investigates the removal efficiency of polystyrene (PS) nanoplastics in a conventional drinking water treatment plant providing drinking water for 500′000 consumers.

This work was funded by the SSIGE (Société Suisse de l'Industrie du Gaz et des Eaux) and SIG (Industrial Boards of Geneva) and performed in a pilot-scale drinking water treatment plant located within the main treatment plant station at Geneva (Switzerland) by Lina Ramirez under the supervision of Serge Stoll. The pilot-drinking water treatment plant reproduce at a reduced scale the different processes and conditions of the main treatment plant, including processes such as coagulation, sand filtration and granular activated carbon filtration.

The authors first evaluated solely the efficiency of the filtration processes on the removal of positively charged PS nanoplastics i.e. by excluding the coagulation process.  Then, the impact of the coagulation process on nanoplastics removal was investigated. The results show that solely filtration achieves an overall nanoplastic removal of 88.1%. The effective removal efficiency of sand filtration increases significantly from 54.3% to 99.2% with coagulant addition, which can be related to nanoplastics surface charge reduction and aggregation, increasing considerably their retention in the filter media. Coagulation process is found to greatly improves the removal efficiency of nanoplastics with an overall removal efficiency of 99.4%.

 

Lien vers l'article: https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:157885

RAMIREZ ARENAS, Lina Marcela et al. Fate and removal efficiency of polystyrene nanoplastics in a pilot drinking water treatment plant. In: Science of the Total Environment, 2022, vol. 813, p. 152623.

 

 

27 Jan 2022

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