Pretreatment Perspectives For PFAS Water Treatment

1.0 ABSTRACT
The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how Wastewater Based Epidemiology (WBE) can be used after COVID-19 in both Municipal and Industrial wastewater systems to proactively monitor, manage, and avoid risks that could negatively impact the business continuity and resiliency of an organization. The history of WBE will first be reviewed to show how it has been used to maximize public health protection and social well-being while minimizing economic impacts and unintended consequences in public and private settings. The design of a WBE monitoring program for Closed, Semi-Closed, and Open Municipal and Industrial wastewater systems will be evaluated through a couple of case studies. Alignment between WBE programs and an organizations risk management programs, sustainability goals, and ethical considerations will also be explored.
2.0 BACKGROUND
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, highlighting the need for action and cooperation worldwide (WHO, 2020a; WHO 2020b). What followed was the implementation of restrictive measures such as lockdowns, curfews, quarantines, businesses closures, domestic and international travel bans, social distancing and mandatory respiratory protection (Howard et al., 2020). While effective in controlling COVID-19 transmission, these restrictions came at a major cost in terms of actual expenses and lost economic opportunities, in addition to trade-offs in wellbeing, mental health and personal freedoms (Cindrich et al., 2021; Gostin and Wiley, 2020).
COVID-19 also resulted in the largest WBE mobilization effort in recent history. WBE provides a scalable, cost-effective way to anonymously track population-level biomarkers of drug use, diseases, and infections like COVID-19. (Keshaviah 2021; Daughton 2020a). Figure 1 shows that unlike clinical diagnostic tests which are invasive, costly, time-consuming and focused on individual testing, wastewater monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 provides the opportunity for pooled or group testing of an entire population served by a centralized wastewater collection and treatment system (Daughton, 2020a; Daughton, 2020b). The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how WBE can be used after COVID-19 in both Municipal and Industrial wastewater systems to proactively monitor, manage, and avoid risks that could negatively impact the business continuity and resiliency of an organization.
3.0 RESULTS The application of WBE for public health decision-making support is not unique to COVID-19 and has been applied to various microorganisms and drug compounds for over 70 years as outlined in Table 1.
While initial WBE efforts focused on population-wide surveillance through collection of samples at the water resource recovery facility, targeted testing has become a more recent focus. Targeted testing at Sentinel Sites is the collection of samples from a limited population usually within the collection system, where the population has varying levels of stability and with the objective of implementing public health interventions upon detection of an infection in the community monitored. Examples of targeted settings are outlined in Table 2. Public health interventions upon the detection of a positive results have ranged from individual clinical testing to detect the infected individuals to administration of vaccinations or booster campaigns. Public health interventions to guide where targeted diagnostic testing could be amplified by monitoring smaller, key, confined sub-populations have also been common (Daughton, 2020b; Gawlik et al., 2021; McClary-Gutierrez et al., 2021). This is also reflected in the CDC WBE Design Considerations shown in Figure 2. This paper will expand upon the CDC WBE Design Considerations for both municipal and industrial sites since WBE may not always be the best surveillance approach in all settings. As Figure 3 shows, when determining whether WBE is the appropriate monitoring tool for these targeted settings, it is important for health departments, employers and other stakeholders to evaluate the population size, population stability, target analyte stability, probability of excretion, preservation of confidentiality, and the implementation of public health intervention. For industrial sites, additional considerations of risks, sustainability, and ethics can also be considered. We then evaluated various targeted settings and scored them based on the 6 critical success factors as shown in Figure 4 where the higher the score the higher the likelihood of WBE success in this setting. The rest of this abstract will explore a few of the key topics previously mentioned. The full paper will include a comprehensive review of all key topics previously mentioned.
3.1 System Types Population stability impacts the implementation and intervention strategies. The three general types of systems are Closed, Semi-Closed, and Open as shown in Figure 5. An overview is also outlined in Table 3.
3.2 Risk Management WBE monitoring can be used to proactively monitor, manage, and avoid risks that could negatively impact the business continuity and resiliency of an organization. Overall, risks are typically grouped into Financial, Strategic, Hazard, or Operational Risks (Borkovskaya, 2018). The results from a Risk Assessment are then evaluated in the organizations Enterprise Risk Management or ERM system following established guidelines like ISO-31000 (ISO, 2018) or COSO (COSO, 2017). Figure 6 outlines specific risks experienced by industry during COVID-19. While this example pulled some information from the meat industry (Hashem et. al., 2020; Ijaz, 2021), similar industries that utilize shift workers, in a centralized or remote worksite with shared or common working, resting, living, or transportation arrangements could be exposed to similar risks. Examples of these industries were previously outlined in Table 2.
3.3 Case Studies Various industrial and municipal case studies using WBE monitoring will be reviewed as part of the final paper. Table 4 summarizes an Industrial case study at a remote mining site.
3.4 Sustainability Beyond just mitigating risks, WBE monitoring can also support the sustainability strategy of the organization. Many municipal and industrial organizations are leveraging sustainability principles to ensure that their products and services benefit society. Figure 7 outlines the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or UNSDG's which are 17 goals adopted by the UN in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity (United Nations, 2015). Table 5 summarizes how WBE monitoring aligns with SDG's 3, 8, 9, 11 and 17.
3.4 Ethics There are also certain ethical considerations that need to be evaluated as part of an existing or new WBE Public Health Surveillance Program. Designing and managing an ethical WBE monitoring program is critical to building and maintaining trust between the people or populations being monitored and the organization performing the monitoring. Unethical actions by the monitoring organization can quickly erode this trust and could even open the monitoring organization up to lawsuits if the rights, freedoms, or legal protections of the monitored people or populations are violated. Figure 8 is a summary of the key ethical considerations for collecting, managing and communicating with WBE data.