Beware of the new threats posed by wastewater treatment plant discharges to aquatic ecosystems
Published Time:
2025-03-21
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What impact do novel pollutants discharged from wastewater treatment plants have on aquatic ecosystems? A collaborative project, EcoImprove, between a team led by Academician Qu Jiuhui, a researcher at the Institute of Eco-Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, discovered that antibiotics discharged from wastewater treatment plants can cause unexpected genetic changes in microorganisms. This research was recently published in National Science Review. The EcoImprove project, a collaboration between the State Key Laboratory of Water Quality and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, used a multidisciplinary approach encompassing environmental science, biology, and statistics to systematically study the impact of wastewater treatment plant upgrades on the biological communities of receiving rivers, as well as the aquatic ecological effects of trace pollutants discharged from wastewater treatment plants.
Through years of research, the project team found that trace pollutants discharged from wastewater treatment plants, although present at extremely low concentrations—only parts per billion to parts per million—can have unexpected effects on aquatic organisms. Taking sulfonamide antibiotics as an example, they can cause epigenetic methylation modifications and gene mutations in the core metabolic genes of microorganisms, altering the metabolic strategies of microorganisms and thus increasing microbial resistance. This finding is of great significance for understanding the ecological risks of wastewater treatment plant discharges.
The research also found, through long-term monitoring of multiple rivers in Beijing, that after upgrading wastewater treatment plants, the concentrations of organic nitrogen and trace pollutants in the rivers decreased significantly, biological communities were restored, and the ecological health of the receiving waters was significantly improved.
Currently, the project team has launched EcoImprove 2, shifting the research focus from ecological risks within the watershed to a combination of ecological and human health risks. The project will focus on the impact of pathogenic microorganisms and viruses discharged from wastewater treatment plants on the health of the population in the watershed.
Relevant paper information: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44320-025-00087-4
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