Degradation of heroin, morphine and 6- monoacetylmorphine in sewage batch test.
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Date
2018-01-16
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomosho
Abstract
The increasing global consumption of some narcotic drugs or drugs of abuse as reported by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is a new source of emerging pollutants that is currently threatening the aquatic ecosystem due to associated toxicity levels. Apart from pharmaceuticals and personal care products, drugs such as heroin, morphine and 6- monoacetylmorphine have been found in the environment thereby worsening the already escalating situations. The persistence of pollutants in aquatic environment is due to their non – biodegradation owing to their hydrophilicity/lipophilicity properties. The pollutants principally reach the environment via Municipal Sewage Works or by direct dumping. Therefore, the degradation studies of drugs at different temperatures and times are apt and would improve removal approach using various sludge types. The analytical method used to determine their biodegradability involves initial characterization and after 3 hours equilibration, the removal rates were then measured for heroin (97.9%), morphine (99.7%) and 6-monoacetylmorphine (93.3%). The three substances have the partition coefficients (Kd) that ranged from 1.2 – 68.1 Kg L-1. At 4 ± 0.5o C, the degradation of compounds occurred slowly, but relatively greater at 19 ± 0.5o C to between 5 and 10%. This paper therefore highlights the degradation studies of heroin and its principal metabolites and clearly demonstrated removal method at different laboratory conditions and times. The conceptual approach is aimed to achieve the best removal conditions to reduce the problems of chemical pollution due to persistence or non-degradation of these classes of drugs in the environment for the first time, a novel aspect of the work.