Occurrence of PPCPs and evaluation of their consumption using wastewater-based epidemiology

Qian, Z. and Yi, J. and Huang, H. and Wu, Z. and Zhang, C. and Guenier, A.W. and Xiong, J. and Bu, J. and Zhang, Y. and Zhang, J. and Qi, S. and Jones, K.C. and Chen, W. (2026) Occurrence of PPCPs and evaluation of their consumption using wastewater-based epidemiology. Water Research, 297: 125610. ISSN 0043-1354

Text (wbe-manuscript-clean-260203)
wbe-manuscript-clean-260203.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (1MB)

Abstract

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in wastewater are key indicators of chemical pollution and community health, yet most wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) studies analyze only the dissolved phase and overlook veterinary contributions. Influent samples in 9 wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) from Wuhan, China were collected to analyze 73 PPCPs in both dissolved phase (DP) and particulate phase (PP). The occurrence, and spatial-seasonal distribution of PPCPs, and their partitioning were investigated. PPCPs were ubiquitous in both phases, reaching up to 1.65 × 104 ng/L (DP) and 2.00 × 106 ng/g (PP). Inclusion of the PP substantially affected basic measurement of total wastewater concentrations. Partitioning was temperature-dependent, and showed correlation with physicochemical properties in winter and spring. The consumption of human, veterinary and shared pharmaceuticals were separately estimated using WBE. The population-normalized daily consumption of individual human pharmaceuticals ranged from 0 to 1.17 × 105 mg/d/1000 inhabitants. Neglecting the PP of pharmaceuticals leads to consumption estimation errors, reaching up to 96.6 %. Statistical analyses indicated that pharmaceutical consumption varied with disease prevalence, substitution and contraindication practices, and socioeconomic indicators. Linear mixed-effects models further suggested that aging, social-service maturity, population density, per-capita output were associated with consumption variability. The daily Loads of individual veterinary pharmaceuticals ranged from 0 to 1.53 × 103 g/d. Strong correlations with shared-use pharmaceuticals indicated clear animal-derived inputs. Under the two specific source allocation scenarios, human- and veterinary-use Loads of pharmaceuticals across 9 WWTPs ranged from 3.52 × 105 to 3.83 × 105 g/d and 9.77 × 102 to 4.26 × 103 g/d, respectively. These findings demonstrate the need to include particulate-phase PPCPs and mixed human-animal sources to improve the accuracy of WBE-based research.