Linking conventional activated sludge treatment plant performances for micropollutants removal to environmental risk and SimpleTreat model assessment

Abstract The attention to the contaminants of emerging concerns or micropollutants is continuously rising, also stimulated by the new initiatives at European level. The present study focuses on the removal of target micropollutants in a conventional activated sludge wastewater treatment plant which is the most common system and considered a source of micropollutants to the environment. The aims were to evaluate the removal efficiency of different stages of the wastewater treatment plant and to conduct the Environmental Risk Assessment on the final effluent. As indicated by the European’s guidelines on Environmental Risk Assessment, the SimpleTreat4.1 model was applied to this purpose: different values of the biodegradation constant, which represents the key factor for modelling, were applied, and the effects on the quality of prediction were evaluated. The evaluations were carried out thorough 3-year monitoring activity in a full-scale wastewater treatment plant on 10 micropollutants belonging to the classes of illicit drugs, pharmaceuticals and psychoactive. The model was found statistically not satisfactory for most of the investigated micropollutants. A better prediction was obtained when the biodegradation constant was calculated based on the full-scale data. Nonetheless, the results obtained in terms of risk were considered acceptable and comparable among each other. Graphical abstract