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(18-07) Comparison of two common treatment processes of municipal landfill leachate with regard to the elimination of xenoestrogens. Coors, Anja*,1, Jones, Paul2, Giesy, John2, Ratte, Hans Toni1, 1 Aachen University of Technology, 52056 Aachen, Germany2 Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 ABSTRACT- The leachate from a municipal landfill was investigated as a part of a larger project assessing the elimination of endocrine disrupting substances from waste water. The raw leachate was treated by use of two parallel operating systems before it was released to the local waste water treatment plant. One process consisted of an aerobe biological degradation followed by ultrafiltration in a membranebioreactor and an additional treatment with activated charcoal. The other treatment was a high-pressure reverse osmosis system. The efficiency of the two methods to remove estrogenic substances was assessed at different steps of the treatment processes. Samples were concentrated by means of solid phase extraction and the estrogenicity of the extracts and dilutions thereof was determined by use of a reportergene-based bioassay with human breastcancer cells (MVLN-cells). The estrogenic activity of the untreated leachate reached up to 70 % of the maximal response achieved with the standard 17- Key words: leachate, estrogenicity, membranebioreactor, reverse osmosis |
-estradiol. The results indicate that both treatment processes eliminated most of the estrogen agonists but were not equally effective. After aerobe biological degradation and subsequent ultrafiltration the estrogenicity of a five-fold concentrated extract was within the control range, even without the activated charcoal adsorption step. Although high-pressure reverse osmosis reduced the estrogenic activity of the extracts, it could not remove all estrogen agonists present in the raw leachate.