Anthropogenic activities are increasingly impacting the quality of water resources. Organic micropollutants (MPs), such as pharmaceuticals, personal care products, pesticides, and industrial compounds, are detected in sewage, surface water, ground water, and drinking water worldwide. The discharged effluent of municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) is an important source of chemical contaminants in surface water. MPs are generally not completely mineralized by the biodegradation or chemical oxidation in WWTP, but transformed into smaller and more polar products, which sometimes can be more persistent and toxic than their parent compounds. This presentation will focus on the removal of MPs during ozone and performic acid-based wastewater treatment processes with case studies conducted in WWTPs in Paris and Berlin. Findings on the characterization of transformation products using high resolution mass-spectrometry coupled with either the generic reversed-phase liquid chromatography or supercritical fluid chromatography (for polar substances) will be presented. The target and suspect screening approaches for previously known chemicals as well as the non-target screening for the identification of unknown substances will be introduced.
Maolida Nihemaiti is a postdoctoral scientist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ (Germany). She received a B.S. degree in Geochemistry (2008) from the University of Science and Technology of China, a M.S. degree in Environmental Science and Engineering (2014) from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia), and a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry (2018) from Curtin University (Australia). Before joining the UFZ, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Université Paris-Est Créteil (France). Dr. Nihemaiti is experienced in understanding the transformation mechanisms of organic contaminants during chemical oxidation and disinfection processes applied for wastewater and drinking water treatments.