Get in touch
555-555-5555
mymail@mailservice.com
Emerging pollutants: hidden enemies at home
By Santi Serrat
Posted in We Are Water. Awarded in iAgua Magazine 2016 for the Best Report.
From the time we wake up until we go to bed, we pour a wide variety of pollutants down our drains.Until a couple of decades ago, most of us were aware of many of them that we believed were biodegradable or more or less controlled.
But today a disturbing reality has emerged: there are many more pollutants in water than we thought, they are not biodegradable and more are being detected every day. The bad news is that a large part of them are due to consumer products commonly used in our homes and it is difficult to eliminate them or we do not yet know how; The good news is that it is in our power to reduce them and, in many cases, eliminate them. The treatment plants cannot with them.
The objective of sanitation in cities is simple: to return water to the environment as we drink it without having to think about it. It is so simple and we are so used to it that we often forget that the infrastructure that makes it possible to make dirty water disappear is complex and expensive. These precious facilities, without which we could not live as we do, are becoming powerless to eliminate a good number of new pollutants that are in our lives and that many times, unconsciously, we dump into the water. They are emerging pollutants, one of the most worrying problems that affect water and, consequently, the entire planet.
Damià Barceló, director of Catalan Institute for Water Research, and one of the scientists who most closely follow water pollution in Spain, defines them briefly and clearly: "An emerging pollutant is a pollutant prior to legislation". In other words, it is a pollutant whose presence or harmful effects have recently been detected and on which the Administrations have not yet issued restrictive measures. Why? Simply because scientists have not yet determined exactly how harmful it is to the environment and people, and because the technologies and, above all, the necessary budgets for purification systems to be able to eliminate them have not yet been clearly defined. guarantee. Emerging pollutants are therefore the ones that are focusing the action of water science the most, and the ones that will generate the most news.
How and with what do we pollute
We become active polluters when out of ignorance we throw expired drugs down the toilet (it is estimated that in Madrid, for example, 4.7 kg of drugs are poured a day), wet wipes, small plastic wrappers, condoms, ear sticks and a long Etcetera of products that significantly impair the operation of treatment plants and for which there is still no useful technology for their massive elimination. This type of active contamination is 100% avoidable, it is enough to not do it: return expired drugs to pharmacies, use recycling bags for solid waste, or simply remember that the toilet is not the garbage can.
However, in general, citizens cannot be considered generators of emerging pollutants, rather we are transporters of them. And this contamination is practically impossible to avoid: it is inherent to our level and lifestyle, since the contaminants are found in the products we consume.
To get an idea of how we live intimately with these substances, let's follow a day in the life of an average family in a city. We can start with the remains of drugs that our body has not assimilated and that we excrete in the urine. Here are some of the common ones detected in the water of our rivers and seas, and the effects that we know they are causing in the environment:
- Anti-inflammatories and analgesics, such as ibuprofen and diclofenac, which in recent years have experienced a spectacular increase. They are affecting the health of many species of fish and algae.
- Antidepressant medications, other substances on the rise, such as diazepam. They have been shown to affect the development of some amphibians, such as frogs.
- Contraceptive residues such as estrogens (female sex hormone) are also abundant. Its effect of feminization of the fish is being studied.
- Antibiotics such as amoxicillin and sulfamethoxazole. They can cause allergic reactions and other dysfunctions.
- Cholesterol regulators, such as bezafibrate, which are frequent drugs in the population over 40 years of age. They affect the metabolism of fish.
How many families are there in our cities that do not send any of these compounds to the toilet at least once a month? Few, according to the data on pharmaceutical consumption that we have.
But the list goes beyond medication. Our morning personal hygiene dumps a good number of contaminants down the drain:
- Brushing your teeth and rinsing with a mouthwash also loads residual water with harmful substances, such as triclosan.
- In cosmetic creams and sunscreen creams, titanium dioxide is often used as a bleach, which is also present in toothpastes that promise dazzling smiles. In this case we find nanoparticles that are materials that are 1 to 100 nanometers in size (1 nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter) that have configured a new type of emerging pollutant whose harmful effects we still know little about.
But it is not only the bathroom that is the main source of domestic contamination. Throughout the house we have the perfluorinates that line many pans, fabrics, rugs and food containers and that we are almost constantly throwing into the water.
When doing the laundry, in addition to the detergents and softeners that we often overload, another nanomaterial leaks into us that very few of us know about: the silver particles present in some garments such as socks to avoid their bad smell. Ionic silver kills bacteria, fungi, viruses and protozoa, it is an ancient antimicrobial, but now it has appeared in alarming concentrations in water from laundry.
At the moment we do not purify them, we have to raise awareness and restrict them
These pollutants not only affect the environment, they are harmful to our health and it is very worrying that they are in the water. To put an end to them in the treatment plants we still do not have the appropriate technologies.
As Barceló points out, “a treatment plant that completely eliminates pollutants would be much more expensive. It would have to have tertiary companies, nanofiltrators, all of them much more complex systems ”. And here we run into a governance problem: as emerging pollutants are not legislated, Administrations do not face the high cost required to adapt the treatment plants, which would eventually end up reverting to the water bill, an unpopular measure but which seems inevitable if we want it to have the best possible quality.
Barceló points out the important work that science plays here to detect new water pollutants and study their harmful effects: “At the moment what we scientists do is investigate. There are thousands of emerging pollutants. Traces are made of certain groups of pollutants depending on what you want to study or evaluate in a given case. It is a very open and complex issue that requires expensive laboratories, as we have to use expensive techniques, such as mass spectrometry, equipment that costs between 200 and 300 thousand euros ”.
As citizens, with emerging domestic pollutants we enter a paradox very similar to others that occur in the complex world of the environment: the more we clean in our homes, in our cities, the more we consume and the more waste we throw out; the cleaner and more hygienic we are in our personal life, the more harmful products we disperse in nature; the more we medicate, the more potentially we can affect that of other living beings on which our ecological balance depends.
The question is complicated, we cannot go back in many consumption habits, some essential for a quality life, but we have to raise awareness and take responsibility to take care of the precious sanitation that allows us to live as we do. Let's take the right doses of medications, let's not self-medicate (which on the other hand is a danger to health) and let's use the right doses of creams, soaps, toothpastes and a long list of products that we often abuse. It is good to remember that almost 2.5 billion people in the world do not have adequate sanitation, this service classified by the United Nations as a human right. Those of us who have it Let's take care of it!
