Plasma Technology for Removal of Pharmaceutical Compounds from the Environment

Pharmaceutical compounds are a very important and integral part of today s modern human life 1. Every year, high amounts of pharmaceutical compounds are produced by pharmaceutical companies around the world to treat human, livestock, and plant s diseases. Therefore, use of these compounds increases the possibility of their introduction into the environment through various ways such as sewage, surface water, and groundwater 2. The entry of these compounds into the environment has brought many environmental and health hazards, such as microbial resistance. On the one hand, microbial resistance to drugs makes microorganisms resistant to these compounds. As a result, it is highly timeconsuming or even impossible to treat human and animal diseases with common drugs. On the other hand, the phenomenon of microbial resistance annually imposes huge costs on the economy, which reveals the need for a powerful removal method 3. The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned about the presence of waterborne contaminants, especially in the drinking water in 2015, and has called for research to remove the contaminants and monitor the toxicity of water.