Impact/Purpose:

The goal of this project is to determine what happens to wastewater compounds during and after undergoing drinking water treatment.

Description:

The amount of water available for human consumption is becoming limited in some communities. Water reuse or recycling has become one method of overcoming this problem. Whether this takes the form of direct water reuse (toilet-to-tap), ground water recharging, or discharging effluent into a water body that another community uses as a source, compounds that persist through wastewater treatment will be in these source waters, and potentially even drinking water. The USEPA has been working with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to determine which compounds are commonly found downstream from wastewater treatment plants, and to study their potential as chemical indicators of human fecal contamination. The next logical step in this collaboration is to determine which compounds commonly enter drinking water treatment facilities and the effectiveness of various technologies to remove them. This will be accomplished through both bench scale disinfection experiments, as well as sampling at drinking water treatment plants known to have source water significantly impacted by waste water. If deemed necessary, samples will also be collected from the distribution system to estimate the transport of these compounds to consumers? homes, as well as potential exposure from consumption. Together, these experiments should explain the fate and incidence of wastewater compounds in drinking water.

Record Details:

Record Type:PROJECT

Start Date:10/01/2005

Projected Completion Date:09/01/2009

Record ID: 81030

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Project Information:

Progress :None; This is a new task

Relevance :The Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water (OGWDW), as well as other federal, state and local agencies, should be able to use this data to protect the public's health by screening drinking waters. This task will provide exploratory occurrence data for risk assessors to use in screening-level risk assessments to determine if there is significant potential risk to justify risk mitigation or whether additional research is needed, particularly whether additional health effects data is needed to adequately screen potential risk. Since many of the compounds being focused on in this task are pharmaceuticals, it also meets one the Office of Wastewater Management's research needs: Characterizing the Presence of Pharmaceuticals in Water and Wastewater. A third benefit is that pharmaceuticals have been listed as candidates for a future Contaminant Candidate List. This project will provide occurrence information to OGWDW for some pharmaceuticals in drinking water. Throughout the course of the project, oral and poster presentations at a wide variety of conferences, as well as publications as certain phases of the task are completed, should keep the scientific and regulatory community informed of our progress.

Clients :Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water

Project IDs:

ID Code :19126

Project type :OMIS