Blogs

Introduction: The Pharmaceutical Contamination Challenge Pharmaceutical micropollutants represent one of the most pressing challenges in modern wastewater treatment. Thousands of pharmaceuticals are in commerce worldwide, and global monitoring keeps finding more of them in water. The 2022 PNAS global river survey—1,052 sampling sites on every continent—found active pharmaceutical ingredients at concentrations above levels considered safe…

Every day, your wastewater treatment plant releases antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) into the environment. And the inline sensors monitoring your treatment process cannot detect them. Here’s the scale of it, per CDC’s 2019 Antibiotic Resistance Threats Report: – 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur annually in the U.S. – 35,000 deaths per year result from these infections…

Key Takeaways PFAS compounds resist conventional treatment; destruction requires advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) rather than transfer to another phase Electrochemical oxidation with boron-doped diamond anodes can destroy long-chain PFAS almost completely at lab scale, at an energy cost that still limits full-scale use Inline water quality analyzers optimize AOP performance by monitoring conductivity, pH, and…

Introduction: The Monitoring Challenge Pharmaceutical wastewater represents one of the most complex matrices in environmental monitoring. Several thousand pharmaceutical compounds are in use globally, and a few hundred are routinely detected in wastewater influents. These compounds—including antibiotics, analgesics, hormones, and antidepressants—create significant treatment challenges. Conventional laboratory analysis (LC-MS/MS, GC-MS) provides compound-specific detection, but each sample…

Introduction: The Sensor Detection Gap Modern water quality sensors—conductivity, pH, turbidity, dissolved oxygen—monitor traditional parameters with excellent precision. However, emerging contaminants represent chemical classes these sensors were never designed to detect. Water industry and regulatory attention has converged on five major contaminant classes that routinely evade conventional sensor detection: 1. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)…

Introduction Municipal water infrastructure stands at a crossroads. Aging pipes built during the post-war boom now exceed their design life, while population growth, climate change, and evolving customer expectations demand systems capable of unprecedented performance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) grades U.S. drinking water infrastructure at C-, warning that deferred investment compounds future…