Environmental Fate and Sustainable Remediation of Veterinary Pharmaceuticals: A Critical Review of Bioremediation Systems and Advanced Oxidation Processes

Abstract

The relentless accumulation of veterinary pharmaceuticals in the environment, driven by an annual global consumption exceeding 100,000 tons, constitutes a paramount ecological threat. While typical background concentrations in receiving environmental waters (rivers, lakes, and groundwater) generally range from 10 ng/L to 5 µg/L, point-source discharges, such as untreated livestock effluents and wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) influents, can present contamination loads orders of magnitude higher, frequently reaching hundreds of µg/L. Wastewater treatment plants often fail to remove these chemicals completely: literature estimates indicate that more than 50 percent of the influent pharmaceutical load may carry over into the final effluent. A critical evaluation of the environmental fate of veterinary antibiotics and of the efficiency and effectiveness of next-generation remediation technologies was given in the present work. It was revealed that single treatments increasingly no longer reach optimal remediation effects and often have to be applied as hybrid systems. Bio-adsorbents, particularly engineered biochar nanocomposites, can present high equilibrium capacities (reaching up to ~500 mg/g for specific target compounds), and when used in combination with novel advanced oxidation techniques and/or tailored bioremediation consortia, hybrid systems can achieve >95% removal of recalcitrant contaminants (tetracyclines and sulfonamides), with substantial mineralization under optimized conditions, though rigorous monitoring of transformation products remains essential. To bridge the gap between laboratory findings and industrial application, this review advocates for standardized kinetic and isotherm modeling, rigorous ecotoxicity assessments of transformation products, and the development of circular economy-driven frameworks to transition these technologies from bench-scale success to full-scale environmental remediation.