Florfenicol removal from veterinary pharmaceutical effluents: Tri-metallic zeolite 5A° for electrochemical oxidation and catalytic ceramic membrane separation

Contaminants of emerging concern, including pharmaceuticals, are commonly found in wastewater from households, farms, and healthcare facilities. When active pharmaceutical ingredients enter water sources, they contaminate the waterways and cause potential hazard effects on the aquatic environment and human populations. This concern is especially critical with antibiotics, due to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains. However, Florfenicol, a bacteriostatic antibiotic widely used in veterinary medicine, poses a significant risk of water pollution when discharged into waterways. In the present study and its practical application, removal of targeted pollutant namely antibiotic florfenicol by ozonation was investigated by measuring chemical oxidation demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and turbidity for pharmaceutical wastewater in the batch reactor, while optimizing feeding electro flocculation voltage, O3 flow rate, O3 dosage and ceramic membrane filtration. Due to the production of hydroxyl radicals with strong oxidation properties, pollutants in wastewater can be effectively degraded via heterogeneous catalytic ozonation. It was examined whether the regenerated catalyst exhibited good catalytic activity after three cycles of washing with Milli-Q water and ethanol. The results show that the effluent concentration of antibiotic Florfenicol is about 99% alongside residual values for 91%, 79%, and 89% for COD, BOD, and turbidity, respectively (Time: 30 min, pH: 7.5). Meanwhile, the wastewater's degradability capacity (BOD5/COD ratio) increased from 0.37 to 0.53, rendering it more readily biodegradable for further treatment. These results indicate that the process of hybrid electro flocculation and catalytic ozonation with ceramic membrane has a high treatment efficiency for veterinary antibiotics, and a continuous-flow reactor can be utilized more practically for a full-scale industrial application.