Water Supply issues a formal retraction in relation to the above article by Shu Xu, Ching-Hsien Hsu and Carlos Enrique Montenegro-Marin. The publisher issues this retraction due to concerns regarding potential citation manipulation due to inappropriate references, as well as issues regarding the validity of data and figures used in the article. The authors did not provide a response to our queries during the investigation. Since the journal did not receive a response to these concerns, the Editors-in-Chief no longer have confidence in the integrity of the article.

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