Fluoxetine is primarily excreted as a parental
Verteporfin in urine (Hiemke and Härtter, 2000), thus it is not surprising to find that compound in effluents and surface waters at low to mid ng/l concentrations (Kolpin et al., 2002; Weston et al., 2001). Fluoxetine residues were detected at a concentration of 0.012 μg/l in streams (Kolpin et al., 2002), at 0.099 μg/l in sewage treatment plant effluents (Metcalfe et al., 2003) and at 0.54 mg/l in municipal effluents (Weston et al., 2001). According to Kwon and Armbrust (2006), in water/sediment systems fluoxetine rapidly adsorbs in sediment, where
channels appears to be persistent. Fluoxetine degradation in sediments has been little studied. It has been found that its degradation mainly depends on light, pH, organic matter, and humic acid. Kwon and Armbrust's (2006) biodegradability experiments indicated that flouxetine did not degrade over 28 days at 20 °C in medium containing inoculum collected from a secondary wastewater treatment plant. Moreover, Redshaw et al. (200
cool concluded that fluoxetine can resist more than 200 days in sewage sludge-amended soils.
