0000000001325274
AUTHOR
Julia Talvitie
Particle balance and return loops for microplastics in a tertiary-level wastewater treatment plant.
Highlights: Dewatering by centrifugation was a step that removed a high number of MPs from the sludge. Sludge retained especially the fibrous microplactics. Reject water transported microplastics inside a wastewater treatment plant. Disc filter-based tertiary treatment ensured removal of 99% of microplastics in wastewater. Microplastics (MPs) from households, stormwater, and various industries are transported to wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), where a high proportion of them are captured before discharging their residuals to watersheds. Although recent studies have indicated that the removed MPs are mainly retained in wastewater sludge, sludge treatment processes have gained less atten…
Optical Monitoring of Microplastics Filtrated from Wastewater Sludge and Suspended in Ethanol.
The abundance of microplastics (MPs) in the atmosphere, on land, and especially in water bodies is well acknowledged. In this study, we establish an optical method based on three different techniques, namely, specular reflection to probe the medium, transmission spectroscopy measurements for the detection and identification, and a speckle pattern for monitoring the sedimentation of MPs filtrated from wastewater sludge and suspended in ethanol. We used first Raman measurements to estimate the presence and types of different MPs in wastewater sludge samples. We also used microscopy to identify the shapes of the main MPs. This allowed us to create a teaching set of samples to be characterized …
Original data for article: Particle balance and return loops for microplastics in a tertiary-level wastewater treatment plant
Microplastics (MPs) from households, stormwaters and various industries are transported to wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) where a high proportion of them are captured before discharging their residuals to watersheds. Although recent studies have indicated that the removed MPs are mainly retained in wastewater sludge, sludge treatment processes have gained less attention in MP research compared to water streams at primary, secondary and tertiary treatments. In this study, we sampled twelve different phases in a tertiary-level municipal WWTP in Central Finland. Our results showed that compared to plant influent load, three times higher number of MPs was circulating via reject water from …