Treatment technologies and degradation pathways of glyphosate: A critical review

• Published in: The Science of the total environment 2020-11, Vol.742, p.140559-140559, Article 140559
• Main Authors: Feng, Dan, Soric, Audrey, Boutin, Olivier
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adsorption; Advanced oxidation processes; Biological treatment; Degradation pathways; Environmental Engineering; Environmental Sciences; Glyphosate; Wastewater
• ISSN: 0048-9697; 1879-1026
• DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140559

Glyphosate is one of the most widely used post-emergence broad-spectrum herbicides in the world. This molecule has been frequently detected in aqueous environment and can cause adverse effects to plants, animals, microorganisms, and humans. This review offers a comparative assessment of current treatment methods (physical, biological, and advanced oxidation process) for glyphosate wastewaters, considering their advantages and drawbacks. As for other molecules, adsorption does not destroy glyphosate. It can be used before other processes, if glyphosate concentrations are very high, or after, to decrease the final concentration of glyphosate and its by-products. Most of biological and oxidation processes can destroy glyphosate molecules, leading to by-products (the main ones being AMAP and sarcosine) that can be or not affected by these processes. This point is of major importance to control process efficiency. That is the reason why a specific focus on glyphosate degradation pathways by biological treatment or different advanced oxidation processes is proposed. However, one process is usually not efficient enough to reach the required standards. Therefore, the combination of processes (for instance biological and oxidation ones) seems to be high-performance technologies for the treatment of glyphosate-containing wastewater, due to their potential to overcome some drawbacks of each individual process. Finally, this review provides indications for future work for different treatment processes to increase their performances and gives some insights into the treatment of glyphosate or other organic contaminants in wastewater. [Display omitted] •Adsorption, biological and oxidation processes for glyphosate in wastewater are compared.•Degradation pathways of glyphosate to AMPA and sarcosine are proposed and discussed.•Combined processes are expected to be interesting technology for glyphosate treatment.•Insights into future research for glyphosate treatment by different technologies are discussed.