Because of the water quality signs of general pharmaceutical wastewater, most pharmaceutical wastewater only need to be treated by biochemical method, which is not qualified at all. Therefore, important pretreatment must be carried out before biochemical treatment. Generally, it is required to set up a dispatching pool to regulate water quality, water quantity and pH. in addition, some physicochemical or chemical method should be selected as pretreatment process according to the actual situation to reduce SS, salinity and part of COD in precipitation. The biological restraint substances in the wastewater are reduced, and then the biodegradability of the wastewater is advanced, which is used for the subsequent biochemical treatment of wastewater.

After the pretreatment of wastewater, it is necessary to select a kind of anaerobic and consistent oxygen process according to its water quality characteristics. If the effluent requirement is high, the aerobic treatment process also needs to be treated. As for the detailed process selection, the nature of wastewater, the role of process treatment, infrastructure investment and operation protection should be considered, which can make the technology feasible and economic reasonable. The total process can be divided into pretreatment anaerobic aerobic - (post-treatment) combined technology.

The combined process of hydrolysis adsorption contact oxidation filtration was selected to treat the general pharmaceutical wastewater containing artificial insulin. After that, the effluent quality could reach the first class standard of GB8978-1996. The process of air floatation hydrolysis contact oxidation can be used to treat chemical pharmaceutical wastewater, composite micro oxygen hydrolysis combined aerobic sand filtration process to treat antibiotic wastewater, and air flotation ubf-cass process is selected to treat high concentration Chinese medicine extraction wastewater.