Chemical monitoring of Swedish coastal waters indicates common exceedances of environmental thresholds, both for individual substances as well as their mixtures

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1 Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
2 Swedish Environmental Research Institute, IVL, Stockholm, Sweden
3 Departement of Mechanics and Maritime Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2894v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Environmental Sciences, Toxicology
Keywords
Chemical mixture, Risk assessment, Non-target screening, Quality standards., Multi-residue screening, Triclosan
Copyright
© 2017 Gustavsson et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Gustavsson MB, Magnér J, Carney Almroth B, Eriksson MK, Sturve J, Backhaus T. 2017. Chemical monitoring of Swedish coastal waters indicates common exceedances of environmental thresholds, both for individual substances as well as their mixtures. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2894v1

Abstract

Chemical pollution was monitored and assessed along the Swedish west coast. 62 of 172 analyzed organic chemicals were detected in the water phase of at least one of five monitored sites. A Concentration Addition based screening-level risk assessment indicates that all sites are put at risk from chemical contamination, with total risk quotients between 2 and 9. Only at one site did none of the individual chemicals exceeded its individual environmental threshold (PNEC, EQS). The monitoring data thus demonstrate a widespread blanket of diffuse pollution, with no clear trends amongst sites. Further issues critical for the environmental chemical risk assessment include the challenges to achieve sufficiently low levels of detection especially for hormones and cybermethrin (a pyrethroid insecticide), the appropriate consideration of non-detects and the limited availability of reliable PNECs and EQS values.

Author Comment

This is a preprint version of a manuscript submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.

Supplemental Information

The file contains the supporting table 1 and 2, containing environmental thresholds for the marine compartment, as well as the sources of those thresholds

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2894v1/supp-1