Due to the huge amounts of antibiotics used, they are increasingly present in wastewaters. In a biological treatment plant antibiotics can not be degraded by activated sludge, because of possible toxicity or simply because the molecules are to complex for biodegradation. The result is accumulation, bioaccumulation in the environment and in living organisms, so therefore antibiotics circulate in the food chain, and at the same time the resistance of more and more bacteria is increasing. In the master's thesis, we wanted to determine the efficacy of purification of model pharmaceutical wastewater with Fenton oxidation for three antibiotics (tiamulin, amoxicillin and levofloxacin) which are used in veterinary and human medicine. We were interested in whether the use of Fenton oxidation as a pre-treatment in a biological treatment plant affects the efficiency of the entire treatment of pharmaceutical wastewater. Fenton oxidation is one of the advanced oxidation processes that breaks antibiotics to smaller or less complex molecules. We were interested in the optimal ratio between the catalyst (Fe2+) and the oxidant (H2O2), with the assumption that the treatment efficiency will be related to the addition of an oxidant. By determining the COD and TOC, we demonstrated the degradation of antibiotics and the rate of mineralization by calculating the oxidation number. Finally, we evaluated biodegradability of degraded oxidation products and finally the toxicity was tested. The final results showed that pretreatment with Fenton oxidation contributes to increase efficiency of the treatment. In the case of tiamulin, biodegradability increased by 8% at the highest oxidant dose compared to the initial sample; at the same time, toxicity levels increased. While when testing amoxycillin and levofloxacin biodegradability increased for 16% and 62% respectively, at the highest dose of the oxidant. Unlike tiamulin, toxicity decreased with other antibiotics. The difference between treatment efficiency of antibiotics is shown at different doses of the oxidant.
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