Nanofiltration & reverse osmosis technical assessment for pesticides removal

Abstract The increasing food demand for a growing population has resulted in the intensification and modernization of agriculture leading to an increasing use of pesticides to protect crops against insects, weeds, fungi, and other pests. These chemical compounds are time-persistant as they usually report low biodegradability and can cause adverse effects on the environment due to their toxicity. This study assesses the use of membranes designed for urban wastewater and drinking water treatment -DuPont FilmTec ™ NF270 and FilmTec ™ XLE membranes- for the removal of six pesticides (atrazine, simazine, isoproturon, metolachlor ESA, 2,4-D, and chlorothalonil) from aqueous streams. The results reported average rejection rates of 29–89% in the case of nanofiltration membranes and > 97% for reverse osmosis membranes. In addition, it was observed adsorption of pesticides within membranes’ active layer, which should be taken into account for the assessment of membranes performance when a fresh membrane is used. From this study can be concluded that membrane-based technology is effective for the removal of these pollutants from aqueous streams, but a customised selection of the membrane (nanofiltration/reverse osmosis) should be performed depending on the targeted pollutants in order to balance the pesticide rejection and energy consumption for each market application.