Greywater is increasingly treated and reused for agricultural irrigation in off-grid communities in the Middle East and other water scarce regions of the world. However, there is a dearth of data regarding levels of antibiotics and herbicides in off-grid greywater treatment systems. To address this knowledge gap, we evaluated levels of these contaminants in two types of greywater treatment systems on four farms in the West Bank, Palestinian Territories. Samples of household greywater (influent, n = 23), treated greywater effluent intended for agricultural irrigation (n = 23) and pumped groundwater held in irrigation water ponds (n = 12) were collected from October 2017 to June 2018. Samples were analyzed using high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) for the following antibiotics and herbicides: alachlor, ampicillin, atrazine, azithromycin, ciprofloxacin, erythromycin, linezolid, oxacillin, oxolinic acid, penicillin G, pipemidic acid, sulfamethoxazole, triclocarban, tetracycline, triflualin, and vancomycin. All tested antibiotics and herbicides were detected in greywater influent samples at concentrations ranging from 1.3 to 1592.9 ng/L and 3.1–22.4 ng/L, respectively. When comparing influent to effluent concentrations, removal was observed for azithromycin, alachlor, linezolid, oxacillin, penicillin G, pipemidic acid, sulfamethoxazole, triclocarban, and vancomycin. Removal was not observed for atrazine, ciprofloxacin, erythromycin, oxolinic acid, tetracycline, and trifluralin. Pond water also contained the majority of tested contaminants, but at generally lower concentrations. To our knowledge, this is the first description of an extensive array of antibiotics and herbicides detected in household greywater from off-grid treatment systems.
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MPRC People
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Amir Sapkota, Ph.D.
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Amir Sapkota Publications
The quantitative scholarship on domestic labor has documented the existence of a gender gap in its performance in all countries for which data are available. Only recently have researchers begun to analyze economic disparities among women in their time spent doing housework, and their studies have been largely limited to the U.S. We extend this line of inquiry using data from two European countries, the former West Germany and Sweden. We estimate the “economic gap” in women’s housework time, which we define as the difference between the time spent by women at the lowest and highest deciles of their own earnings. We expect this gap to be smaller in Sweden given its celebrated success at reducing both gender and income inequality. Though Swedish women do spend less time on domestic labor, however, and though there is indeed less earnings inequality among them, the economic gap in their housework is only a little smaller than among women in the former West Germany. In both places, a significant negative association between women’s individual earnings and their housework time translates into economic gaps of more than 2.5 hours per week. Moreover, in both countries, women at the highest earnings decile experience a gender gap in housework that is smaller by about 4 hours per week compared to their counterparts at the lowest decile.
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MPRC People
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Liana C. Sayer, Ph.D.
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Liana Sayer Publications