Anica Pavlinović

Given the environmental burden associated with pesticides, it is necessary to quantify their potential impacts and investigate impact mitigation alongside their removal. Most existing life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) studies lack direct experimental data on residual concentrations, limiting their ability to realistically assess the toxicity-related benefits of pesticide mitigation. This study addresses that gap by linking experimentally determined pesticide removal with LCIA. Three LCIA methods (Environmental Footprint (EF), TRACI, and ReCiPe) were used to evaluate pesticide impacts, as they reflect different global regulations and conditions, resulting in different potential impact estimates. Removal of atrazine, imidacloprid, metolachlor, and tebuconazole from tap water and groundwater was carried out using nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) membranes. The results showed 81–99% pesticide removal with RO membranes and 27–96% removal with NF membranes, depending on the pesticide. Freshwater ecotoxicity and human toxicity (cancer and non-cancer effects) were quantified for untreated matrices and compared to results obtained with NF and RO treatment data. The findings indicate that NF and RO treatment can reduce calculated pesticide toxicity impacts across the evaluated categories.

Pesticide contamination from agricultural activities has become a growing environmental concern since pesticides can migrate across environmental compartments and accumulate on undesirable surfaces and in water bodies. Given their high toxicity to living organisms and resistance to degradation, developing effective removal strategies is essential. This study investigates the removal of pesticide atrazine from a binary solution using commercially available nanofiltration (NF) and reverse osmosis (RO) membranes, with molecular weight cut-offs of 150–300 Da and 100–200 Da, respectively. The experimental study was conducted in a laboratory-scale RO/NF system with six cells connected in parallel over a duration of 3 h. Removal efficiency was determined by analysing all samples (feed and permeate) using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. The results showed that the atrazine removal efficiency ranged from 16.0 to 84.9 % with NF membranes, and from 64.0 to 93.1 % with RO membranes, indicating that size exclusion was the main removal mechanism.

Pesticides and their transformation products migrate through environmental compartments, contaminating soil, air, and water. Because of their stability and low biodegradability, their presence in groundwater poses a high risk to human health. This study investigated the removal of atrazine and its transformation products from groundwater using nanofiltration and reverse osmosis, with the aim of selecting the more suitable membrane for drinking water production. Reverse osmosis showed better removal of atrazine and its transformation products than nanofiltration due to its lower molecular weight cut-off, i.e., smaller pore size. The removal of transformation products is lower than that of atrazine because of their lower molecular weight.

Objective: Due to the avid interest in devising economically and environmentally viable and readily available materials for pesticide-contaminated water treatment, the effective-ness of clinoptilolite, a natural zeolite, its modified Na-form, as well as ZSM-5, a synthetic zeolite, was investigated for the removal of the fungicide carbendazim from aqueous solutions. Methods: The removal was investigated using batch ad-sorption by mixing zeolite and the carbendazim solution at different contact times. At the end of each experiment, the suspensions were filtered, and the residual concentration of carbendazim in the filtrates was measured using high-per-formance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The experimental results were used to calculate the efficiency of tested zeolite types for the removal of carbendazim from aqueous solu-tions. Results: Synthetic zeolite was highly effective (94.5%) in removal of carbendazim from aqueous solutions when compared to natural zeolite (19.5–23.3%) and its Na-form (22.5–29.0%). However, the residual carbendazim concen-tration for all three zeolites tested was above the maximum allowable concentration (MAC). Conclusion: Zeolite ZSM-5 exhibited outstanding properties for the removal of the carbendazim fungicide from aque-ous solutions; however, high production costs could be a limiting factor for a wider application in water treatment. For practical applications, natural zeolite may be a more economically viable choice, regardless of its significantly lower removal efficiency. Its surface properties would need to be modified and improved by organic surfactants, which would require additional experiments. Finally, the cost-ef-fectiveness of modified natural zeolite should be compared to the production cost of synthetic zeolite to determine the most effective, economically advantageous, and envi-ronmentally friendly solution for the treatment of pesti-cide-contaminated water.