SimpleTreat: A Spreadsheet-Based Box Model to Predict the Fate of Xenobiotics in a Municipal Waste Water Treatment Plant.

摘要

A non-equilibrium steady state box model is reported, that predicts the fate of new chemicals in a conventional sewage treatment plant from a minimal input data set. The model, written in an electronic spreadsheet (Lotus(TM) 123), requires a minimum input: some basic properties of the chemical, its emission rate and a few parameters to account for the scale and mode of operation of the plant. The main advantage of this approach is that it provides legislators with a quick insight if a chemical will be an air, water or sludge pollutant when it is discharged into sewage works at a certain rate. The presented model, SimpleTreat, is an application of a general purpose box modelling system, SimpleBox, which is a spreadsheet-based computational framework developed for environmental fate modelling. Several examples are given to illustrate the influence of volatility, hydrophobicity and biodegradability. Emission patterns as a function of physico-chemical properties (Henry's law constant and the octanol-water partition coefficient) are plotted for degradable and non-degradable compounds.