Abstract:

Trace pharmaceuticals released from urban wastewater plants can devastate aquatic life, while cost limits all known technically effective removal technologies to larger wealthier jurisdictions. Developing a broadly usable, safe, and sustainable drug removal process for urban, industrial, and environmental waters is a critical goal for sustainable chemistry and engineering. Here, we show that the NewTAML catalyst, NT7, with peroxide at strikingly low NT7/H2O2 concentrations effectively purifies diverse waters of six spiked high-concern drugs. For example, ofloxacin is driven to a nondetectable state by either ultradilute NT7 (2.5 nM, 1.4 ppb) or very dilute H2O2 (30 μM, 1 ppm) by balancing the complementary reagent with time as a concentration-dependent variable. NT7 deactivation kinetics reveals that each NT7 molecule does more work before decomposing at lower concentrations (the TON using 10 nM NT7 is 1245 and 100 nM is 195), promising significantly lower costs of more dilute treatments at scale. Projecting to a real-world scale, remarkably low quantities of NT7 (8.4 kg) and H2O2 (5.1 tons) would remove within 12 h most pharmaceuticals from one million tons of comparable municipal wastewater, the daily output of ca. 6.7 million Europeans. In this way, NT7/peroxide exhibits great potential to make the pharmaceutical industry safer and more sustainable.