Taking medicine can help us get better when we’re ill. But our bodies won’t absorb all of a drug. The leftovers leave in our urine. Water treatment plants were never designed to remove those drugs. So they just flow through these cleanup plants and into rivers and other sources of drinking water. But a simple low-cost, two-step process could help end that. An added benefit, this treatment also removes plant fertilizers. And that’s a good thing, because they can trigger blooms of harmful microbes in lakes, rivers and streams. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at China Agricultural University in Beijing developed the new process. They shared how it works in the December 5 Journal of Hazardous Materials.