Citation:

GLASSMEYER, S. EMERGING CONTAMINANTS IN THE WATER CYCLE: FATE AND TRANSPORT. Presented at USEPA Workshop on Building an Integrated Surveillance System for Emerging Chemicals in the Great Lakes and Nationwide, Chicago, IL, July 16 - 18, 2007.

Impact/Purpose:

The initial objective is to evaluate a large suite of chemical compounds for their correlation the incidence of illness due to human contamination of water sources. The ultimate objective of this task is to develop and evaluate a method that will determine the two to five strongest chemical candidates that are associated with human waste streams, and determine their ability to monitor water quality and predict human health effects in source and finished waters as a surrogate for traditional methods of human fecal contamination.

Description:

In the past decade, the scientific community and general public have become increasingly aware of the potential for the presence of unregulated, and generally unmonitored contaminants, found at low concentrations in surface, ground and drinking water. The most common pathway for the introduction of these chemicals is from an upstream direct discharge of wastewater effluent. In the US, there are more than two dozen communities that draw their drinking water from streams that consist of more than 50 % wastewater during low flow conditions. The US Geological Survey (USGS) and US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) have been working on a series of collaborative research projects to determine the complex mixtures of chemicals that are commonly present in wastewater effluent, the persistence of these chemicals in surface and ground waters, the removal of these chemicals during drinking water treatment, the formation of by-products during chlorination and the presence of these chemicals in finished drinking water. In effluents collected at eleven wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) across the US, 72 out of 110 monitored chemicals were detected at least once, documenting incomplete removal during wastewater treatment. Downstream of the WWTPs, the chemicals exhibited varying environmental persistence. In the source water of one conventional drinking water facility, 45 out of 113 monitored chemicals were detected at least once, with 21 chemicals still detectable in the finished drinking water. This documents the incomplete removal of such chemicals during treatment. In companion laboratory studies on the effects of chlorination, eight of the 14 chemicals investigated were oxidized by the disinfectant, two of which were at least partially chlorinated. Taken as a whole, these studies demonstrate that to understand the comprehensive environmental impact of emerging contaminants, their persistence, removal efficiencies during waste and drinking water treatment, as well as the potential for by-product formation, must be known.

Record Details: