Emerging Contaminants: Occurrence, Treatment Efficiency and Accumulation Under Varying Flows

Abstract

Emerging contaminants became a major topic in water treatment when laboratory detection methods for concentrations at a nanogram-scale improved approximately two decades ago. Research on using ecotechnologies to remove emerging contaminants in variable stormwater and wastewater flows has been conducted for more than a decade, but so far, not all removal mechanisms are well understood and only few setups have been investigated. This chapter summarises the current knowledge, focussing on pesticides and emerging contaminants listed on the watch list of the European Union. However, large-scale investigations are still rare and further research will have to be conducted in this field to enable practitioners to provide recommendations for design and maintenance of treatment facilities in the field of ecotechnologies.