Estimation of adsorption/desorption Freundlich's affinity coefficients for oxytetracycline and chlortetracycline from soil properties: Experimental data and pedotransfer functions

Tetracycline antibiotics spread in the environment constitute a real threat, causing risks that should be controlled. Retention/release of these compounds after interacting with soil components are the main process governing their entry into water bodies, plant uptake, and availability for soil microorganisms. In this work, batch-type experiments were performed to study adsorption/desorption of oxytetracycline (OTC) and chlortetracycline (CTC) in 63 crop soils. The Freundlich model satisfactory described adsorption curves, showing strong affinity of both antibiotics to soils, with adsorption coefficient (K-F(ads)) values between 1015 and 9733 Ln mu mol(1-n) kg(-1) for OTC, and between 1099 and 11344 Ln mu mol(1-n) kg(-1) for CTC. Desorption percentages were always lower than 10%, indicating that adsorption is highly irreversible. Furthermore, the desorption coefficient (K-F(des)) correlated positive and significantly with K-F(ads), showing that those soils characterized by higher adsorption were also those showing less desorption. Soil organic carbon (SOC) was the soil characteristic that most explained the variance of K-F, both for adsorption and desorption, which caused that soils with higher SOC scores showed higher adsorption and lower desorption for both antibiotics. Pedotransfer functions were developed for OTC and CTC, and resulted effective to satisfactory predict K-F(ads) and K-F(des) values. These equations would facilitate an easy identification of soils vulnerable to antibiotics pollution, which would allow to program appropriate management practices to decrease undesirable effects on the environment and on public health.