INNOVEC’EAU responds to the European Commission Framework Directive on the monitoring of “priority pollutants”. Thus, the project carried out a transnational study on the substances expelled in the wastewater of nursing homes in the south-west of Europe and, consequently, developed a pilot project on innovative technologies for the treatment and monitoring of drug residues, taking into account the environmental dimensions , sociological and economic. The project is particularly new as part of the association of a physical-chemical procedure with a biological treatment procedure for optimal decontamination of wastewater that allowed the development of prototypes based on solar photo-oxidation reactors and a decontamination unit in based on a biological procedure and a photo-catalytic procedure. The project has also created an analysis instrument, based on electrochemical captors and bio-captors, for online and real-time monitoring of the degradation of pollutants.
The results of the project include:
- The characterization and comparison of wastewater from nursing homes to select a total of 12 pharmaceutical substances to analyse.
- The development of a treatment and control of wastewater before being rejected in the urban network of wastewater.
- The analysis of the perception of the populations and actions of communication and sensitization to the problem of the contamination of the waters by pharmaceutical substances. Among these, some video clips and informational scripts were made.