Teva
Together with pharmaceutical manufacturer TEVA Zrt., we investigated ways to remove pharmaceutical residues at its Debrecen plant. We tested photo-oxidation technology in a standard industrial container housing six reactors, with a combined capacity of 100 m3/day.
Project overview
Technology
Foto-oxidáció
Treatment capacity
100
m3/day
Treatment efficiency
>90%
Our role
We tested our own proprietary photo-oxidation technology at TEVA Zrt.'s Debrecen plant.
01
The client
Teva was founded in 1901 and is headquartered in Israel. Its current portfolio spans 3,500 different products, and it manufactures nearly 85 billion tablets and capsules each year across 65 manufacturing sites worldwide. Teva ranks among the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, with an active presence in 60 markets. Its medicines are taken by 200 million people every day.
02
What we did
Together with pharmaceutical manufacturer TEVA Zrt., we investigated ways to remove pharmaceutical residues at its Debrecen plant. We tested photo-oxidation technology in a standard industrial container housing six reactors, with a combined capacity of 100 m3/day. Using this setup, we treated the effluent from the plant's industrial wastewater pre-treatment system — which includes a biological (MBR) stage — over a six-month period. We collected forty samples from the container's outflow under various photo-oxidation operating settings, and tested each one for 34 different active pharmaceutical ingredients using GC-MS analysis.
Outcome
The results confirmed that photo-oxidation is effective at breaking down persistent active pharmaceutical ingredients. It removed a wide range of compounds with 70–90% efficiency, including highly hazardous substances such as tacrolimus. Alongside the plant-scale trial, we also tested a smaller, single-reactor, bench-scale photo-oxidation unit (6 m3/day). The results confirmed that the technology is suitable for further scale-up and industrial application — whether for residual organic matter removal, disinfection, or recirculating treated water within the plant.