Research Information System
Euro-Mediterranean Journal for Environmental Integration, vol.9, no.1, pp.23-47, 2024 (ESCI)
Over the last decade, the pharmaceutical industry has driven considerable development, raising the standard of living and health care in Morocco and the world. However, humanity has seen an explosion of industrialization throughout the health sector as the population has grown. This growth leads to the generation of substantial waste, such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products. These discharges pose severe problems for the environment. This situation requires efforts to treat this waste. Extensive research has resulted in the development of various methods to minimize or completely detoxify the debris, including physical and chemical methods. Wastewater treatment plants can use physical and chemical processes alone or in combination. Since both types of technologies have inflated costs and require enormous amounts of energy, chemicals, and the disposal of the sludge produced by the processes, interest has turned to combined technologies because they are less expensive and the resulting end products are less toxic. Therefore, in the above context, this review discusses various treatment strategies that have been developed to achieve the goals of a clean environment. The work analyzes the different physicochemical treatment techniques for pharmaceutical wastewater to find the least expensive and most effective techniques for eliminating emerging contaminants. This study examines the different techniques for treating pollutant-laden discharges, such as coagulation–flocculation, membrane filtration, advanced oxidation, adsorption, flotation, and hybrid treatments combining physicochemical and biological processes.