Pharmaceuticals and personal care product (PPCPs) are widely detected in natural surface and ground water and have emerged as the environmental contamination with potentially widespread environmental effects. PPCPs wide range has been detected in a variety of environmental samples at levels ranging from ng kg -1 up to g kg-1. Over the past few years, there has been increasing awareness of the unintentional presence of PPCPs in various compartments of the aquatic environment (e.g. water, sediments and biota) at concentrations capable of causing detrimental effects to the aquatic organisms. This has become a major concern because PPCPs are extensively and increasingly used in human and veterinary medicine as well as in cosmetics resulting in their continuous release to the environment. There is an urgent need to develop material for removing this group of compounds from wastewater.

Target of present project was to develop pine needle based activated carbon (AC) and biological activated carbon (BAC) having capacity to remove PPCPs from wastewater. Chemical activation was performed by impregnating the washed, dried, and crushed pine needles in H3PO4, ZnCl2 and Iron. Adsorption capacity of AC and BAC was tested in batch mode and fixed-bed mode.The four target compounds of the study were caffeine, bis- phenol-A, estriol and ibuprofen.Effect of adsorption experiments variables such as fixed bed height, feed flow rate and contaminant concentration were analysed for assessing adsorption capacity of prepared AC and BAC using the experimental setup shown in Figure 1. The following were the observations:

• 7.5 cm adsorbent length, 1 mL min-1 feed flow rate and lower concentration of targeted concentration were found the best condition for getting maximum adsorption capacity.

• On the basics of plate experiments, bacterial strains were selected for batch mode experiment. Effect of variables such as temperature, pH, RPM, inoculum volume and different concentration of target PPCP compounds (up to maximum harmful limit) were studied for microbial degradation studies in batch mode.

• These bacterial strains have shown the ability to grow in mineral salt media at temperature range 4°C-25°C (25°C opt.) and pH range 6.5-8 (7 opt.).

• The selected bacteria showed positive response for the degradation of caffeine, bis- phenol A, Ibuprofen and Estriol.