Emerging organic contaminants in sewage sludge

Identifier:  TDX:826

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX826

Authors:  Nieto Cebrián, Antonio

Abstract:
The scope of this thesis is to develop analytical methods to determine a group of pharmaceuticals and personal care products included in the list of so called 'emerging organic contaminants'. <br/>The methods are based on pressurized liquid extraction as extraction technique and due to the polarities of these contaminants, liquid chromatography was the selected separation technique. Because the low concentration of these contaminants in sewage sludge, sensitive and selective detection technique have to be used such as mass spectrometry (with quadruople or time of flight analyzers) and tandem mass spectrometry (with triple quadrupole analyzer) using in all cases the electrospray interface.<br/>The methods developed have been used to monitor several groups of pharmaceuticals and personal care products from sewage sludge from two different sewage treatment plants. The samples have been collected in Tarragona, where no studies related to the control of these compounds have been done.