Treatment Technologies for the Removal of Endocrine Disruptors from Wastewater and Drinking Water

In the past decade, concerns about endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs)4 in the environment increased as advocacy groups, the popular press, and the public came to appreciate the significance of a variety of environmental perturbances that had been identified by individual researchers (Colborn, et al., 1997). The reproductive and developmental and difficulties observed in fish and other animal populations attributed to EDCs were paralleled by questions about their possible effects in people: How might fertility and development, reproductive health measures such as sperm count, and reproductive milestones such as puberty onset be influenced by hormonal changes from EDCs? How might EDCs be involved in cancers of tissues that are inextricably linked to hormones, such as breast, testicles and prostate? Many questions such as these have been considered by investigators of EDCs' effects on ecological and human health and reviewed by US EPA (1997) and NRC (2000).