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PERSISTENCE OF PHARMACEUTICALS AND OTHER WASTEWATER RELATED COMPOUNDS: UTILITY AS INDICATORS OF HUMAN FECAL CONTAMINATION
Citation:
GLASSMEYER, S., E. L. FURLONG, D. L. KOLPIN, J. D. CAHILL, S. D. ZAUGG, S. L. WERNER, AND D. D. KRYAK. PERSISTENCE OF PHARMACEUTICALS AND OTHER WASTEWATER RELATED COMPOUNDS: UTILITY AS INDICATORS OF HUMAN FECAL CONTAMINATION. Presented at 2005 Sustainable Beaches Conference, St. Petersburh, FL, October 31 - November 02, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
The objectives of this task are to evaluate a large suite of chemical compounds for their correlation with the concentration of indicator microbes, and determine their ability to monitor water quality in source and finished waters as a surrogate for traditional methods of human fecal contamination.
Description:
The quality of drinking and recreational water is currently ascertained using indicator bacteria. The tests to analyze for these bacteria require a considerable length of time to complete, and do not discriminate between human and animal fecal material sources. To shorten the time needed to test water quality and distinguish the fecal pollution source, chemicals found in human wastewater, such as pharmaceuticals, surfactants, and fecal sterols, can be used as tracers of human fecal pollution. These chemicals would have the advantage of requiring shorter analysis times, and can be selected to be human specific. At ten locations, water samples were collected upstream, and at two successive points downstream from a wastewater treatment plant. A treated effluent sample was also collected at each location. This longitudinal sampling scheme was used to determine the persistence of the target compounds in streams. The water samples were extracted using either solid phase or liquid-liquid extraction and were analyzed using either liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry or gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Of the 110 chemical analytes investigated in this project, 78 were found in at least one sample. Seventeen of the 110 compounds were classified as either a prescription or non-prescription pharmaceutical. Of these, nine were found in at least 50 % of the samples and thirteen were found in at least 10 % of the samples. While most concentrations of all of the compounds were in the range of 0.1 to 1.0 ?g/ L, in some of the more highly contaminated samples, concentrations were in the range of 5-20 ?g/ L. The concentrations of the majority of the chemical compounds present in the samples generally followed an expected trend: 1) they were non-existent or at only trace levels in the upstream samples, 2) had their maximum values in the wastewater effluent samples, and 3) declined in the two downstream samples. This work indicates that these chemical analytes do have utility as tracers of human wastewater discharge.