Electrochemical abatement of cefazolin: Towards a viable treatment for antibiotic-containing urine

Abstract

Abstract The release in the environment of antibiotics develop microbial resistance. In this work we investigated the feasibility of the electrochemical degradation in synthetic urine of cefazolin (CFZ), an antibiotic used for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant infections, which could be carried out in hospital wards on source-separated urine. CFZ is primarily excreted in urine without modifications. The removal of CFZ from human wastes would contribute to slow down the diffusion of CFZ-resistant bacterial strains more efficiently, compared to the treatment of much larger volumes of wastewater. CFZ can be electrochemically degraded using relatively low current density (≥0.5\xa0mA\xa0cm−2) and without important generation of toxic by-products such as chlorate (