Toxic organics, pharmaceuticals and antibiotics are currently only partially or not at all removed from wastewater, as today’s wastewater treatment will only partly degrade those substances. Therefore, those substances will be found in the effluent from wastewater treatment plants and this can be a threat to both human health and aquatic species.

Photocatalytic membranes show great promise as a method to combat the challenge of toxic organics in wastewater. The novel photocatalytic membrane developed in the project was shown to photocatalytically decompose organic compounds such as pharmaceutical residues and dyes in both tap water and treated effluent from a membrane bioreactor (MBR) wastewater treatment process. Several parameters affecting the affinity of the pharmaceuticals to the membrane surface, such as the hydrophobicity and pKa of the pharmaceuticals and the pH of the water, were shown to affect the efficacy of the removal.

Finally, when irradiated with UV light the photocatalytic membrane showed promise of keeping high flux and reducing downtime by lengthening the cleaning cycle.