Fate of 14C-acetyl sulfamethoxazole during the activated sludge process
Résumé
Compared to antibiotic parent molecule, human metabolites are generally more polar and sometimes not less toxic in wastewater.
However, most researches focus on the fate of parent molecule. Therefore, behaviors of human metabolites are little known.
Moreover, though much has been done on the fate of antibiotics during activated sludge process, there are still some limitations
and gaps. In the present study, [Ring-14C] acetyl sulfamethoxazole (14C-Ac-SMX) was used to investigate the fate of human
metabolite of SMX during activated sludge process at environmentally relevant concentration. At the end of 216 h, 3.1% of the
spiked activity in the initial aqueous phase was mineralized, 50% was adsorbed onto the solid phase, and 36.5% still remained in
the aqueous phase, indicating that adsorption, not biodegradation, was the main dissipation pathway. In the existence of microbial
activities, accumulation into the solid phase was much higher, which was less bioavailable by chemical sequential extraction. The
multimedia kinetic model simultaneously depicted the fate of Ac-SMX in the gas, aqueous, and solid phases, and demonstrated
that microbially accelerated accumulation onto the solid phase was attributed to lower desorption rate from the solid phase to the
aqueous phase, where adsorption rate was not the key factor. Therefore, Ac-SMX cannot be efficiently mineralized and remain in
the aqueous or the solid phases. The accumulation in the solid phase is less bioavailable and is hard to be desorbed in the existence
of microbial activities, and should not be easily degraded, and may lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and
genes after discharge into the environment.