Widespread occurrence of pharmaceuticals has started to attract attention as aquatic micropollutants that might have been affecting the ecological system in trace amounts. The risks associated with their introduction into wildlife habitats is becoming an important issue for both regulators and the pharmaceutical industry, because of incomplete elimination of pharmaceuticals wastewater and their metabolites. In this study there are different classes of pharmaceuticals.
This work aims to remove some of pharmaceutical residues in industrial wastewater.The identification and quantification of chemical and pharmaceutical residues was explored using Gas Chromatography with Mass detector GC/MS spectrometer and the analytical method was used Environmental Protection Agency method (EPA625) determination of the concentration in industrial wastewater using liquid chromatography-based tandem mass spectrometry LC/MS/MS spectrometer with electrospray ionization (ESI) and the analytical method was used (EPA 1694). The study recorded occurring of different types of pharmaceutical residues with different concentration levels in wastewater. The concentration levels in wastewater were detected for caffeine at 9465 ng mL-1 and for Naproxen at 2 ng mL-1 these concentrations representing about 500 fold higher than international safety margin of treated wastewater. Magnetic activated carbon (MAC) is proposed as a new techniqe for the adsorption of pharmaceutical residues (Caffeine and Naproxen).The isotherms as well as adsorption kinetics are explored. The results obtained high adsorption capacity of caffeine and naproxen over MAC which has reached 1.8 mg g-1 and 1.6 mg g-1 after 15 min for both caffeine and naproxen. First order model is fitted well with the experimental results through a correlation coefficient (0.978) for (caffeine) and second order model is fitted well with the experimental results through a correlation coefficient (0.9887) for (Naproxen). Moreover, the adsorption of both (caffeine and naproxen) on MAC is proceeded using freundlish isotherm model considering correlation coefficient (0.953 and 0.948) respectively. The benefits of using MAC are the low cost of synthesis and its easy and fast separation from solution by using a magnet.