Attenuation of pharmaceutical substances: phytoremediation using constructed wetlands

Introduction: Currently, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) do not efficiently remove pharmaceutical substances (PS). Thus, such substances are now frequently found in aquatic ecosystems worldwide. Also, concentrations of some PS in treated effluents exceed Environmental Quality Standards proposed by EU legislation. One resource-efficient option for increasing PS removal in WWTP effluents is to use constructed wetlands (CWs) as an attenuation step (Breitholtz et al. 2012; Li et al. 2014). However, very little research has been done on how to maximize the PS attenuation capacity of CWs. Therefore, a project with the aim to investigate reduction of different pharmaceutical substances in CWs with different vegetation compositions and water depths, was performed at the Experimental Wetland Area (EVA) located 20 km north of Halmstad, Sweden.