The presence of pharmaceuticals especially the antibiotics in water bodies is a new and emerging issue to engineers and scientists dealing with drinking water and wastewater reuse systems. Although the concentration of these antibiotics vary in the aquatic environment, but its continuous release may pose serious threats to the aquatic and human organisms. These antibiotics may enter the aquatic system by three main possible ways; (i) the compound may finally be mineralized into carbon dioxide and water, (ii) the compound does not degrade easily due to its lipophilic nature and may be partially be retained in the sedimentation sludge and (iii) the compound may be transformed into more hydrophilic molecule, passes through wastewater treatment plant and ultimately received in the drinking water. Such pharmaceuticals show the highest persistence in the environment.  Thus from the above mentioned discussion, it can be concluded that the presence of residual antibiotics in the environment and in the aquatic system in particular, imparts a serious environmental problem due to the fact that (i) these antibiotics are extremely resistant to biological degradation (ii) may impose toxic health effect in human and other living species (iii) and may continue to persist in the aquatic environment at extremely low concentrations, thus highly sophisticated analytical tools are needed for their exact measurement. Here, in this project, we propose a non-biological solution i.e., in the form of “Advanced Oxidation Processes” (AOPs) for the remediation of the antibiotically contaminated aqueous media. AOPs can be defined as aqueous phase oxidation system which rely on the production of a highly reactive specie such as (primarily but not exclusive) hydroxyl radicals (^•OH) involved in the destruction of a target pollutant. The widely used AOPs include homogeneous or heterogeneous photocatalysis based on near UV or solar irradiation, electrolysis, ozonation, the Fenton’s reagent, ultrasound and wet air oxidation, while less conventional but emerging processes include ionizing irradiation, pulsed plasma and ferrate reagent.

Sometimes, it is necessary to couple the AOPs either with the physiochemical or biological process depending on the properties of waste stream to be treated. For example, AOPs are costly processes so it is used in the pretreatment stage to initially convert the non-biodegradable refractory compounds to biodegradable intermediates followed by biological post treatment.

In some cases, the oxidation via ^•OH radical is slow and the need of reducing species like aqueous electron (e_aq^─) becomes important. These still newer technologies containing both oxidizing and reducing species are termed as advanced oxidation reduction technologies (AORTs) such as ionizing radiations from radioactive isotopes or fast moving electrons from electron beam accelerator. The overall process of AOPs can be summarized by single reaction as;

Organic pollutant + Oxygen results in Carbon dioxide, water and mineral acid