Wastewater-based epidemiology: deriving a SARS-CoV-2 data validation method to assess data quality and to improve trend recognition.

Introduction: Accurate and consistent data play a critical role in enabling health officials to make informed decisions regarding emerging trends in SARS-CoV-2 infections. Alongside traditional indicators such as the 7-day-incidence rate, wastewater-based epidemiology can provide valuable insights into SARS-CoV-2 concentration changes. However, the wastewater compositions and wastewater systems are rather complex.

Treatment of micropollutants in wastewater: Balancing effectiveness, costs and implications.

In this contribution, we analyse scenarios of advanced wastewater treatment for the removal of micropollutants. By this we refer to current mainstream, broad spectrum processes including ozonation and sorption onto activated carbon. We argue that advanced treatment requires properly implemented tertiary (nutrient removal) treatment in order to be effective.

Development and testing of a fractionated filtration for sampling of microplastics in water.

A harmonization of sampling, sample preparation and detection is pivotal in order to obtain comparable data on microplastics (MP) in the environment. This paper develops and proposes a suitable sampling concept for waterbodies that considers different plastic specific properties and influencing factors in the environment. Both artificial water including defined MP fractions and the discharge of a wastewater treatment plant were used to verify the derived sampling procedure, sample preparation and the subsequent analysis of MP using thermal extraction-desorption gas chromatography - mass spectrometry (TED-GC-MS).