Abstract:
Pharmaceutical Compounds (PCs), are synthetic substances intensively consumed by humans and continuously released into the urban wastewater. Often, the removal of PCs from wastewater is found to be insufficient, or even absent if population is not connected to the sewage system and wastewater is directly emitted into the environment. In the last decades, the PCs have aroused special attention because they have been found in surface water at concentrations that can cause negative effects on the aquatic biota and environment. Studies employing PCs monitoring and modelling techniques on surface waters have been mainly conducted in developed countries, while studies in developing countries are still scarce. Attempting to fill this gap, this work focused specifically in Colombia, where the occurrence of PCs has not been thoroughly studied and monitoring plans are barely done due to high costs. This work employed the Exposure to Pharmaceuticals in the Environment (ePiE), a spatially distributed model only implemented and used in Europe, to predict concentrations of PCs in rivers and lakes by considering their consumption, fate and transport. So, it aimed to create a new ePiE model network taking as a case of study the prediction of Naproxen and Paracetamol in the Upper Catchment of the Cauca River, Colombia, an area with a different socio-economic and climatic conditions with respect to the European continent. The methodological approach included: a) data collection on PCs’ consumption, physicochemical properties and removal in Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs); b) consolidation of geodata of the study area such as hydrology, hydrography, urban agglomeration and WWTPs location; c) model building by using the open-source software environment R; d) analysis of the model sensitivity to input parameters; e) model validation. The results showed that all concentration predictions deviate within a range of only one order of magnitude from measurements which is a remarkable result when dealing with such high uncertainties. In terms of magnitude prediction, for the worst-case scenario, Naproxen and Paracetamol were found to exceed the environmental standards thresholds in 9% and 1% of the model river network nodes respectively. Overall, this research aimed to assess the applicability of the ePiE model in estimating the presence of PCs in a subregion of Colombia, demonstrating that it is feasible to expand ePiE to other areas and giving insights about the spatial distribution of pharmaceuticals substances so hotspots can be identified and several scenarios can be built in future works.
Citación recomendada (normas APA)
Juan Felipe Hernández Arredondo, "A Modelling Approach to Estimate the Presence of Pharmaceutical Compounds in the Upper Catchment of the Cauca River, Colombia", Cauca (Río, Colombia):-, 2023. Consultado en línea en la Biblioteca Digital de Bogotá (https://www.bibliotecadigitaldebogota.gov.co/resources/3711883/), el día 2025-05-09.
