Photodecomposition of antibiotics and their transformation products in wastewaters using ZnO and TiO2 with LED lamps

This work presents a study of the behavior of three antibiotics (erythromycin (ERY), clarithromycin (CLR) and sulfadiazine (SFZ)) and their transformation products (TPs), generated after photolytic and photocatalytic (TiO2 and ZnO) treatments, in wastewater irradiated with ultraviolet (UV) light emitting diode (LED) lamps as light source. For this, an analytical methodology for the antibiotics and their TPs was developed. Thus, samples were treated by salting-out assisted liquid–liquid extraction (SALLE) and identification and quantification was carried out by liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry (LC-MS) using quadrupole time-of-flight (QTOF) and triple quadrupole (QqQ) analyzers, respectively. The results revealed the presence of 14, 13 and 5 TPs of ERY, CLR and SFZ, respectively, being found in wastewaters spiked with the antibiotics during photo-oxidation treatment. Subsequently, the established analytical method was also applied, in a real case, to study of behavior of these pharmaceuticals (0.2 mg L-1) and their TPs generated in wastewater during a photocatalytic treatment. In this case, 13, 11 and 2 TPs were tentatively identified ERY, CLR and SFZ, respectively. In addition, the photocatalytic treatment using TiO2 exhibited higher degradation rate than photocatalytic treatment using ZnO. The ECOSAR programme was used to estimate the potential ecotoxicity of the identified TPs. The results showed a potential hazard of SFZ, CLR, ERY and some of their TPs to aquatic organisms. Furthermore, some of the identified TPs were found to be more toxic than their parent compounds.