Emerging contaminants

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Emerging contaminants or emerging pollutants (loosely translated: emerging pollutants ) is a collective term for various substances and substance groups whose occurrence in the environment was only discovered in the 1990s or later. These can be synthetic or natural substances. Emerging contaminants are currently not recorded as standard in environmental monitoring. However, they can be released and have been shown or possibly have negative effects on the environment or human health.

A comparable principle to summarize the recently increasing number of infectious diseases is used in medicine with the emerging infectious diseases .

Examples

The emerging contaminants include, for example:

Demarcation

Substances that are already included in the EEC directive 76/464 / EEC from 1976 or the list of priority pollutants published by the American Environmental Protection Agency in 1978 are not counted among the emerging contaminants. These “conventional” environmental chemicals are mostly determined by gas chromatography with mass spectrometry coupling (GC / MS).

The detection and quantification of some polar substances was only possible with the help of liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry coupling (LC / MS) and LC / MS / MS, which was further developed later .

Substance groups

Drug residues

In the countries of the European Union, around 3000 different medicinal substances are used for human medicine. After their use, most of them are eliminated from the body. Medicinal residues are not completely broken down in sewage treatment plants . Further sources of pharmaceutical residues in the environment are, for example, factory farming , the wastewater from pharmaceutical manufacturers or the disposal of pharmaceutical residues via sewers and household waste. Some drugs from the families of antidepressants , beta blockers or lipid regulators can be subject to bio-concentration or bio- accumulation in water .

Substances from the group of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are usually the drugs that occur in the highest concentrations. You do not need a prescription. Ibuprofen often reaches particularly high concentrations ; paracetamol and salicylic acid (as a breakdown product of acetylsalicylic acid ) are also contained in considerable quantities in wastewater.

Prescription beta blockers are also found regularly, most notably atenolol , metoprolol, and propranolol .

In 2010, Katharina Kern's dissertation ( Danger Source: Water - An Integral Approach to Reducing Drug Residues in Water ) was awarded the German Study Prize.

Drug residues

According to the 2007 World Drug Report, around 200 million people around the world use illegal drugs at least once a year. Drug residues are therefore considered pseudo-persistent in the environment, similar to drug residues. Drugs, sometimes as conjugates or metabolites , are excreted in the urine by drug users and end up in the wastewater. The effect of these substances in the environment has not yet been clarified, but they show an effect on humans even in low doses. With the exception of cannabinoids, these are polar compounds that cannot be assumed to accumulate in living things.

Methods for analyzing these substances are based on liquid chromatography in combination with tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS / MS). Quantifying drug residues in wastewater as a cheap and anonymous method for estimating drug use in a region was first proposed in 2001. In practice, this was achieved in 2005 when cocaine abuse in northern Italy could be assessed in this way.

The highest concentrations usually reach cocaine and its main metabolite benzoylecgonine (BE), which are in the upper ng / l or even µg / l range. The highest value found with an average of 4226 ng BE / l occurred in the inlet of a sewage treatment plant near Barcelona.

Of the opiates examined , only morphine reached concentrations in the upper ng / l range, presumably they are mainly due to medical use. Heroin , on the other hand, was not found or found only in very small quantities, which is attributed to low consumption and the rapid hydrolysis to morphine and 6-acetylmorphine.

Also, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and its metabolites were either not at all or only in small concentrations detectable.

Of the amphetamine- like substances, ephedrine is most frequently found in wastewater samples. Ephedrine is used in medicine, among other things.

3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA), 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-ethylamphetamine (MDEA or MDE) and 3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) are regularly found in the ng / l range.

Δ 9 - Tetrahydrocannabinol , the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis , is largely excreted from the body in metabolized form. The main metabolites are 11-nor-9 carboxy-THC (nor-THC) and 11-hydroxy-THC (OH-THC).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Directive 76/464 / EEC (PDF) of the Council of May 4th 1976 on pollution caused by certain dangerous substances discharged into the aquatic environment of the Community
  2. ↑ US Environmental Protection Agency: Priority Pollutants . Retrieved January 18, 2009
  3. ^ Damià Barceló: Emerging Organic Pollutants in Waste Waters and Sludge . Volume 5.1 of the series The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry . Springer-Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-540-21365-1
  4. ↑ a b Mira Petrovic, Jelena Radjenovic, Cristina Postigo, Marina Kuster, Marinella Farre, María López de Alda, Damià Barceló: Emerging Contaminants in Waste Waters: Sources and Occurrence . in Damià Barceló, Mira Petrovic (Ed.): Emerging Contaminants from Industrial and Municipal Waste . Springer-Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-540-74793-2
  5. ↑ koerber-stiftung.de: Link to the pdf ( memento of the original from April 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.koerber-stiftung.de

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