Assessing the potential use of Water Treatment Sludge containing Activated Carbon for the removal of Emerging Pollutants

The presence of emerging pollutants (EP) in water bodies and its impacts on the environment and human health is of the utmost importance. Estrogens are a group of EP, that have a high prevalence in the environment and toxicity even at low concentrations, which leads to adverse impact in both wild and human life’s. This group include compounds such as estrone (E1), 17-estradiol (E2) and 17-ethinylestradiol (EE2). The discharge of wastewater into the environment is one of the main causes for the release of these compounds in the environment. Wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove EP. Therefore, it is important to add complementary treatments to remove these compounds, especially with the increasing of the incentive of the reuse of treated wastewater, promoted by the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals. There are several additional treatments to accomplish EP removal. The adsorption process is one of the commonly used since it is simple to design and operate and does not generate toxic by-products. There are many kinds of adsorbent materials, however, the most used is activated carbon (AC). AC shows high removal capacity for the removal of E1, E2 and EE2. However, AC’s regeneration is an expensive process and result in a material with low adsorption capacity. As a result, efforts are being raised to find low-cost adsorbents. The use of water treatment sludges (WTSs) containing AC as an alternative adsorbent provides a new way of sustainable resources management, lining up with circular economy proposals and on another hand will contribute to the decarbonization of the water treatment industry. This work studied the potential of WTS containing AC for the removal of E1, E2 and EE2. For this purpose, WTS from two water treatment plants (WTP), St. Águeda WTS and Caldeirão WTS were characterised and tested as adsorbents. Both WTSs showed adsorption potential with efficiencies removal results above 50 %, without a significant decrease in their granulometry. For Caldeirão WTS final concentration for all the three EP were lower than the limit of quantification. As for St. Águeda WTS, the results for E1 and E2 removal were similar to Caldeirão WTS removal performance. However, for EE2 the removal efficiency was lower than the obtained with Caldeirão WTS. These results lead to a new approach in the management of this erstwhile reside and removal of EP

NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES: a data set on carnivore distribution in the Neotropics

Mammalian carnivores are considered a key group in maintaining ecological health and can indicate potential ecological integrity in landscapes where they occur. Carnivores also hold high conservation value and their habitat requirements can guide management and conservation plans. The order Carnivora has 84 species from 8 families in the Neotropical region: Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Otariidae; Phocidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae. Herein, we include published and unpublished data on native terrestrial Neotropical carnivores (Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae). NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES is a publicly available data set that includes 99,605 data entries from 35,511 unique georeferenced coordinates. Detection/non-detection and quantitative data were obtained from 1818 to 2018 by researchers, governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, and private consultants. Data were collected using several methods including camera trapping, museum collections, roadkill, line transect, and opportunistic records. Literature (peer-reviewed and grey literature) from Portuguese, Spanish and English were incorporated in this compilation. Most of the data set consists of detection data entries (n = 79,343; 79.7%) but also includes non-detection data (n = 20,262; 20.3%). Of those, 43.3% also include count data (n = 43,151). The information available in NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES will contribute to macroecological, ecological, and conservation questions in multiple spatio-temporal perspectives. As carnivores play key roles in trophic interactions, a better understanding of their distribution and habitat requirements are essential to establish conservation management plans and safeguard the future ecological health of Neotropical ecosystems. Our data paper, combined with other large-scale data sets, has great potential to clarify species distribution and related ecological processes within the Neotropics. There are no copyright restrictions and no restriction for using data from this data paper, as long as the data paper is cited as the source of the information used. We also request that users inform us of how they intend to use the data