RSA Associate and e-fate expert Gary Roberts recently published a paper entitled “Quantitative structure-property relationships for predicting sorption of pharmaceuticals to sewage sludge during waste water treatment processes” in Science of the Total Environment. The paper is the final output from a PhD supervised by Gary during his previous role in AstraZeneca.
The paper looks at methods for understanding the sorption of pharmaceuticals to sewage sludge during waste water treatment processes, and consequently their environmental fate and in risk assessments. The paper concludes that standardization of test materials for the measurement of Kd would improve comparability of data from different studies, in the long-term leading to better quality environmental risk assessments.
The full reference is given below:
Berthod, D.C. Whitley, G. Roberts, A. Sharpe, R. Greenwood, G.A. Mills, Quantitative structure-property relationships for predicting sorption of pharmaceuticals to sewage sludge during waste water treatment processes, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 579, 1 February 2017, Pages 1512-1520, ISSN 0048-9697, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.11.156.