Millions of women around the world take synthetic hormones via birth control pills or hormone replacement therapies. Not all of the estrogen-like compounds from these and other treatments are used by the body — small amounts are excreted and end up in municipal wastewater. And there's been no good way to completely remove these hormones before they head to rivers and seas.

But a team of scientists in the U.S. and Britain now think they may have hit upon a solution based on the combination of a common household chemical — hydrogen peroxide — with a special ingredient to make it work faster.

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Peroxide-based water treatment might be a way around the obstacles of the other approaches, say researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Brunel University in London. They've collaborated to test a small version of such a system in the lab, and published their promising findings earlier this month in the journal Scientific Reports.

When the scientists combined a concentrated version of hydrogen peroxide with specially-created catalysts — small molecules that act like enzymes to speed up a chemical reaction — the mixture was able to break down synthetic estrogen in laboratory water, synthetic urine and small amounts of real wastewater. What's more, feminized male fish put in the treated water began to make less vitellogenin, a protein normally made by female fish.