Comprehensive screening and occurrence-removal assessment of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in wastewater treatment plants using high-resolution mass spectrometry.

The extensive use of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) has led to their increasing presence in urban wastewater. The discharge of these contaminants into natural water bodies poses a threat to human health and the ecological environment. This study developed an integrated target, suspect, and functional group-dependent screening method for PPCPs via UHPLC-Q-Orbitrap HRMS, and this method was applied for investigation of occurrence of known and unknown PPCPs in 90 water samples from 18 wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) located along the Yangtze River. The results demonstrated that 39 target PPCPs were detected in at least one of the analyzed samples, and it was worth noting that sulfadimethoxine (SDM) exhibited a detection frequency of 100 % with a concentration range of 1.48-67,400 ng/L. We also observed that water samples from different treatment processes exhibited different contamination profiles of PPCPs. On the basis of concentrations of PPCPs detected in water samples, the overall removal efficiency of PPCPs was preliminarily calculated to be 85.3 % for the WWTPs. The treatment processes had a significant effect on the overall removal of the 39 PPCPs (Mann-Whitney U test, p < 0.001). Through suspect screening, a total of 1632 compounds were detected, with three successfully identified; through nontarget screening, 18 unknown PPCPs were identified. This study provided an efficient technique for comprehensive screening of known and unknown PPCPs in environments, and further explored the concentration differences of PPCPs during various treatment processes in WWTPs.