ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of extraction and detection techniques applied to the determination of pharmaceutical compounds in sewage sludge from urban wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The main routes for the appearance of pharmaceuticals in the environment are the release of wastewater effluents from WWTPs and also land application of sewage sludge generated as a by-product of wastewater treatment. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry is widely used for the determination of pharmaceuticals in sewage sludge. Extraction methods should be simple and easy to perform, should require small volumes of organic solvents, should generate little waste, and should require cheap equipment to make the methodology affordable for routinely monitoring pharmaceuticals in sewage sludge. To obtain information about the concentrations of pharmaceutical compounds in the sludge treatment line, sewage sludge from different treatment stages was sampled from some urban WWTPs based on activated sludge technology and from a composting plant.
