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The presence of personal care products in the environment is recent and relatively few researches work with the quantification of this class of emerging contaminants in Brazil. However, a wide variety of these products is continuously released into the aquatic environment. The growing interest in these substances occurs mainly because they exhibit biological activity in very low concentrations, which gives great environmental relevance. The difficulty of detecting and quantifying such contaminants in the environment encourages the development and validation of appropriate analytical methods for this purpose. Therefore, the present study aims to validate a methodology and verify its efficiency in the determination of six personal care products, among them parabens and triclosan. The samples were submitted to the solid phase extraction process and were later analyzed by gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry for the determination of personal care products. The validation of the methodology used was based on the standards established by the National Health Surveillance Agency. The extraction and quantification method were efficient for the determination of these analytes in water samples.

To determine the presence of emergent contaminants in aquatic environments and to evaluate responses of the dominant taxa of benthic macrofauna, seven stations were sampled along three rivers that serve as public water suppliers in three sampling campaigns, in the Upper Iguassu Basin, Brazil. Concentrations of ethinylestradiol, fenofibrate, ibuprofen and triclosan were detected in the water and sediment. To correlate patterns of distribution and abundance benthic fauna with the various contaminants found a redundancy analysis (RDA) was applied and showed positive relationships between faunal groups, that indicate stress (such as Tubificinae), and emerging pollutants (such as ibuprofen and ethinylestradiol). The analysis also showed that the most influential variables in the distribution of the fauna were exclusively anthropogenic, which shows that these compounds can be harmful and that the rivers destined for the supply are receiving pollutant loads.

In urban areas, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) play a major role in the water quality of rivers. The removal efficiency of emerging contaminants by WWTPs is strongly correlated with the type of treatment and the hydraulic retention time (HRT) of the process, which can vary according to the volumetric influent flow of wastewater and occasional peak flows. This paper aims, for the first time, to assess the daily variation of lipid regulators and personal care products in an urban river impacted by domestic effluents. Samples were collected upstream and downstream of a WWTP. The concentrations downstream of the effluent discharge were higher than upstream, but they varied significantly during the day. Concentration peaks upstream of the WWTP were detected at 07:00, 15:00 and 21:00, while downstream of the effluent discharge, concentration peaks occurred between 13:00 and 19:00 and between 21:00 and 23:00. The highest downstream concentrations of triclosan and methylparaben (420 ng L−1 and 460 ng L−1) were 6.8 and 5.4 times higher than the lowest concentrations detected, respectively. These results show that in WWTP-impacted rivers, the time of the sampling has a great influence on the final results and conclusions of a monitoring study.

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