The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the USA has published Treating Contaminants Of Emerging Concern, an extensive review of recent literature on wastewater treatment technologies and their ability to remove a number of chemical contaminants of emerging concern (CECs).
This report describes The CECs Removals Database, a Microsoft Access® database designed to store and manage information from published scientific studies of the removal of CECs from water and wastewater. The report does not present an analysis of the database information.
For illustrative purposes, the report presents 16 of over 200 CECs present in the database, and the average percent removals achieved by full-scale treatment systems that employ six of more than 20 reported treatment technologies.
Wastewater treatment plant operators, designers, and others may find this information useful in their studies of ways to remove CECs from wastewater. EPA stresses that it is not promoting any one technology nor setting agency policy or priorities in terms of risk.
Reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration are among the combinations of technologies reviewed. The literature review report and the searchable file were peer-reviewed for completeness and usability.