Sewage sludge was excluded from the list of component materials for the production of EU fertilizing products and it was banned as feedstock to produce pyrolysis & gasification materials in European Commission's technical proposals for selected new fertilizing materials under the Regulation 2019/1009 (STRUBIAS report). This exclusion of pyrolysis as a viable way to treat sewage sludge was mainly due to the lack of data on the fate of organic pollutants at pyrolysis conditions. In this work, we are addressing this knowledge gap. We studied slow pyrolysis as a potential process to efficiently treat organic pollutants present in stabilized sewage sludge. Sewage sludge was pyrolyzed in a quartz fixed bed reactor at temperatures of 400-800 °C for 2 h and the sludge and resulting sludge-chars were analyzed for the presence of four groups of organic pollutants, namely (i) polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), (ii) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), (iii) pharmaceuticals, and (iv) endocrine-disrupting and hormonal compounds. Pyrolysis at ≥ 400 °C effectively removed pharmaceuticals (group iii) to below detection limits, whereas pyrolysis at temperatures higher than 600 °C was required to remove more than 99.8% of the compounds from groups i, ii and iv. Based on these findings, we propose, that high temperature (>600 °C) slow pyrolysis can satisfactory remove organic pollutants from the resulting sludge-char, which could be safely applied as soil improver.

Department of Green Chemistry and Technology Faculty of Bioscience Engineering Ghent University Coupure Links 653 9000 Gent Belgium

Department of Power Engineering and Department of Gaseous and Solid Fuels and Air Protection Faculty of Environmental Technology University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Technická 5 166 28 Prague 6 Czech Republic

Department of Power Engineering and Department of Gaseous and Solid Fuels and Air Protection Faculty of Environmental Technology University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Technická 5 166 28 Prague 6 Czech Republic; Department of Green Chemistry and Technology Faculty of Bioscience Engineering Ghent University Coupure Links 653 9000 Gent Belgium; The Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Chemical Process Fundamentals Rozvojová 135 165 02 Prague 6 Czech Republic

Department of Power Engineering and Department of Gaseous and Solid Fuels and Air Protection Faculty of Environmental Technology University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Technická 5 166 28 Prague 6 Czech Republic; The Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Chemical Process Fundamentals Rozvojová 135 165 02 Prague 6 Czech Republic

Department of Power Engineering and Department of Gaseous and Solid Fuels and Air Protection Faculty of Environmental Technology University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Technická 5 166 28 Prague 6 Czech Republic; The Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Plasma Physics Za Slovankou 1782 3 182 00 Prague 8 Czech Republic

Institute for Environmental Studies Faculty of Science Charles University Benátská 2 128 01 Prague 2 Czech Republic

The Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Microbiology Vídeňská 1083 142 20 Prague 4 Czech Republic; Institute for Environmental Studies Faculty of Science Charles University Benátská 2 128 01 Prague 2 Czech Republic

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