Constructed wetlands for livestock wastewater treatment: Antibiotics removal and effects on CWs performance

Abstract

Constructed wetlands (CWs) are defined as engineered wetlands that utilize natural processes involving soil, wetland vegetation and their associated microbial assemblages to assist the treatment of wastewaters or other polluted water sources. Although CWs have been applied to different types of wastewaters, CWs application to livestock wastewaters is more complicated do to the characteristics of these waters and only a few studies have reported CWs application in these cases. Livestock wastewater can contain diverse veterinary drugs, including antibiotics, which are normally not removed in wastewater treatment plants. Consequently, veterinary antibiotics or their active compounds can enter directly in the water system through effluent discharges, which can lead to serious toxic effects in organisms and promote antibiotic resistance. Therefore, efficient wastewater treatments are needed. Considering the problematic of antibiotics release in the environment, the need for methodologies to efficiently remove these compounds from wastewater effluents, namely from livestock wastewater effluents, and the scarcity of studies on the application of CWs to deal with this problem, authors have been developing a series of studies to evaluated CWs applicability for livestock wastewater treatment. Studies have been assessing not only antibiotics removal but also antibiotic possible effects on CWs performance. These studies will be presented in this chapter.