Degradation kinetics of pollutants present in a simulated wastewater matrix using UV/TiO 2 photocatalysis and its microbiological toxicity assessment Priyanshu Verma 1 • Sujoy Kumar Samanta 1 Received: 27 February 2017 / Accepted: 27 May 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract Water pollution is one of the major concerns over long-term sustain- ability of the environment. Effective and efficient treatment of polluted wastewater is still a serious challenge for global researchers. In the last 2–3 decades, due to the incessant emergence of micropollutants in surface and ground water bodies, several endeavors have been made to resolve the water pollution issues either through chemical, physical and biological degradation processes or through removal/sepa- ration processes using different adsorbents and membranes. It has been found that most of the studies are mainly limited to single or binary pollutant analysis in a pure water matrix. Therefore, in this novel investigation, a mixture of five different pollutants has been studied for UV/TiO 2 -based photocatalytic degradation. In the present study, a commercially available TiO 2 , an antibiotic, i.e. Ciprofloxacin and four different synthetic dyes, i.e. Rhodamine B, Methylene Blue, Methyl Orange and Amaranth have been used as a photocatalyst, a pharmaceutical and various industrial dyes, respectively, in a batch photocatalytic reactor system with a stirrer. It is important to note that the commercial TiO 2 photocatalyst has also been char- acterized with the help of several characterization techniques. The present study is mainly focused on the degradation of different micropollutants present in the simulated wastewater matrix and their individual degradation kinetics. It is inter- esting to observe that MB and RhB have shown the maximum degradation followed by CIP (96.21, 96.15 and 89.62%, respectively). In addition, a microbiological assay has also been performed to check the toxicity variation in the degraded products. It Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11164-017-2992-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Sujoy Kumar Samanta sksamanta@iitp.ac.in 1 Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Bihta, Patna 801106, India 123 Res Chem Intermed DOI 10.1007/s11164-017-2992-6