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Properly designed “rain gardens” can effectively trap and retain up to 99 percent of common pollutants in urban storm runoff, potentially improving water quality and promoting the conversion of some pollutants into less harmful compounds. This is according to new research scheduled for publication in the February 15, 2006 issue of the American Chemical Society journal, “Environmental Science and Technology”. The affordable, easy-to-design gardens could help solve one of the nation’s most pressing pollution problems.

Prescription and nonprescription pharmaceuticals or their metabolites have been reported to occur at very small concentrations in some finished drinking water samples in the U.S.

This article explains the presence of measurable pharmaceutical residuals originating in municipal sewage, which, in turn, provides a means of predicting the likely appearance of individual contaminants in effluents and downstream water sources.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have published an interesting study that sheds light on the fate of a familiar pharmaceutical as it enters the waste stream. In work initially described last year, NIST chemists investigated probable chemical reactions involving acetaminophen when the drug is subjected to typical wastewater processing.

This Water Environment Research Foundation report by LK Lampe, entitled “Post-project monitoring of BMPs/SUDS to determine performance and whole-life costs”, states that, over the past 20 years, the use of Best Management Practices (BMPs) in the United States has been instrumental in reducing both the detrimental impacts to receiving water quality and the exacerbated flooding caused by urbanization and storm water drainage. More recently, Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) have started to be used in the United Kingdom.