Efficacy of water treatment methods for the removal of pharmaceuticals

I love the graph you featured from this data set. I was just wondering if you could explain it to me in layman's terms. :) I'm not too familiar with pharmaceuticals or water treatment methods.

I'll give it a shot...I spend so much time around technical jargon it can be hard to break free...

The table contains some common pharmaceuticals that have been found in municipal waste water before. What is tabulated is the rate at which these pharmaceuticals break down when treated with the different water treatment methods. The scale is logarithmic so that, for example, Ibuprofen breaks down about a billion times faster when ozone and UV are combined than with just ozone alone.

What this means, practically, is that the water treatment methods with the faster rate are simply better at removing that compound from the water. So if one was concerned about pharmaceuticals ending up in the drinking water ozone based methods are clearly far superior to chlorination methods.

Gotcha -- very interesting stuff. Thanks for the clarification. :)