Occurrence of the main metabolites of the most recurrent pharmaceuticals and personal care products in Mediterranean soils

Abstract The use of sewage sludge and wastewater in agricultural lands provide contaminants to soils. As a result, a large number of contaminants can be present in soils. Among others, pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are two of the most studied families of emerging contaminants in wastewater. However, there is scarce information about their behaviour in soils. Occurrence, fate and behaviour in soils of metabolites are even less known. In this work, the degradation of most recurrent PPCPs in the environment and their main metabolites has been evaluated using batch experiments in three typical Mediterranean soils. Batch experiments were carried out in a climatic chamber using spiked soils under Mediterranean climatic conditions. The studied compounds were five pharmaceutically active compounds (carbamazepine, ibuprofen, caffeine, sulfamethoxazole and diclofenac), two parabens (methylparaben and propylparaben) and twelve of their main metabolites. Studied PPCPs and metabolites showed different adsorption capacity onto the studied soils. As results, despite of the compounds were spiked at the same concentrations, different contents were measured at the beginning of the batch experiments. The soil 3 showed the lowest degradation rate for all studied compounds what could be related with the higher adsorption capacity of this soil. A decrease of the measured contents was observed for all studied compounds, except in the case of CBZ and EP-CBZ. No transformations of parent compounds into their metabolites or vice versa were observed, except in the case of Ibuprofen and its metabolites. Although the results showed overall short degradation times for the most of the compounds studied, the evaluation of the environmental risks of the PPCPs and their metabolites should not be underestimated.