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Peering Into the Shadows of Chemical Space. Emerging Contaminants and Environmental Science: Is Either Being Served by the Other?
Citation:
DAUGHTON, C. G. Peering Into the Shadows of Chemical Space. Emerging Contaminants and Environmental Science: Is Either Being Served by the Other? Presented at Second International Conference on Occurrence, Fate, Effects, and Analysis of Emerging Contaminants in the Environment, Fort Collins, CO, August 04 - 07, 2009.
Impact/Purpose:
Extended presentation & Slide presentation
Description:
A decade has passed since the term “emerging” was first formally used to describe the existence of waterpollutants not previously recognized; a 1998 NRC workshop ("Identifying Future Drinking WaterContaminants") and several 1999 reports by USGS were among the first to feature the term "emergingcontaminants." In the larger historical context, however, the issue of emerging contaminants evolvedfrom concerns regarding unregulated trace organic pollutants, a topic of interest to the U.S. EPAbeginning in the 1970s (e.g., see Donaldson, doi:10.1021/es60127a012).This marks an excellent time to reflect on a number of questions surrounding this rather ill-defined butbroadly used term. In describing various aspects of environmental science, has its use served us well? Isit leading us where we need to be in terms of a scientific discipline? What message does it convey to thepublic, legislators, and regulators? Do we share a common understanding as to what an "emerging"contaminant might be? Are we perhaps suffering from its overuse? Used as a modifier for a bewilderingarray of phenomena and activities,"emerging" and some of its allies such as "nano" have becomefrequently used in environmental science - - perhaps sometimes serving merely as obligatory but tokenadjectives adding little value. The published literature on emerging contaminants began to escalate in 2001-2003 and became abona-fide topic of active investigation and discussion in 2003-2005; the numbers of publications nowtotal several thousand - - possibly obeying Moore's Law for exponential growth. Such a rapidlyexpanding literature challenges its in-depth examination even by experts, forcing narrower specializationand less synthesis of the field as a whole. Distilling the published literature into a useful body ofknowledge is a daunting challenge, which unmet greatly increases the risk of duplication of work orfailure to focus on the highest priority needs. Two recent but rare examples of valuable data mining andsynthesis are the compilations of occurrence and waste treatment data for pharmaceuticals and personalcare products by Miège et al. (doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2008.11.045) and Onesios et al.(doi:10.1007/s10532-008-9237-8).
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Peering Into the Shadows of Chemical Space. Emerging Contaminants and Environmental Science: Is Either Being served by the Other?
DAUGHTON 09-022 SLIDE PRESENTATION.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 3163 KB, about PDF)