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Bad news--medication we take goes through our bodies and enters environment and other animals. Can wetlands help?

By Rain Noe - August 24, 2010

in Tech

Nowadays more people than ever seem to be on meds, which makes the following fact just so, so gross: Apparently when we take medication like mood stabilizers and beta-blockers, a fraction of it goes into our body, and the rest goes right through us into the toilet. Said medication then evades the normal wastewater filtration processes, and the resultant sewage goes out into the world. And then "even small amounts of these compounds can significantly affect the health of animals and ecosystems.... Unabsorbed hormones from birth-control pills and other drugs can make their way into rivers, where they can alter the reproductive patterns of fish."Bad enough we've got oily oysters, now we're looking at ducks on Prozac, fish with screwed-up hormones...it doesn't sound good. At any rate I came across this information while researching an otherwise positive breakthrough in wetland filtration, whereby bacteria and ultraviolet light are successfully being used to rid contaminated water of copper traces; researchers are now hoping to apply the technology to the pharmaceuticl problem. Read all about the specific process here here, and read about how wetlands work in general here.

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Greg

14 years ago

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Wetlands are great for dealing with stormwater runoff and the final nutrient removal of wastewater but as far as removing these pharmaceuticals, I'm somewhat skeptical. Advanced oxidation processes (using ozone or hydrogen peroxide) at the final stage of treatment in wastewater plants seem to be the best method for preventing these compounds from entering the environment. Lots of people don't realize that the water and compounds we send down the drain is typically only treated by three processes: Skimming the off the gunk that floats to the top and sinks to the bottom, Allowing bacteria to eat the biological material, and dosing it with a bit of chlorine at the end. Any nasty compounds that don't get skimmed off will generally make it through the entire process. Remember that next time you have some paint brushes to clean or send drain-o down the drain....
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Dario

14 years ago

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How close are we of ending up like "Children of Men"?
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Mike Nelson Pedde

14 years ago

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There's an interesting article in the current (August 2010) issue of Harrowsmith Country Life magazine (http://www.harrowsmithcountrylife.ca/current_issue.htm) about using human sewage from settling ponds as agricultural fertilizer. This is one of the things mentioned in that article.

Mike.
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