Development and Demonstration of an Endocrine-Disrupting Compound Footprint Calculator

Abstract

Chemicals in personal care products used in everyday lives become part of the wastewater stream. Wastewater treatment plants were not designed to remove these chemicals; therefore, these products and their metabolites persist in the effluent. Many of these chemicals are known, or suspected to be, endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs) and can cause adverse impacts to aquatic organisms at trace concentrations. Here, we developed a publicly available EDC footprint calculator to estimate a household’s EDC footprint. The calculator prompts users to input the number of products they own in each of three categories: health and beauty, laundry, and cleaning. The calculator, which is programmed with average values of EDCs in each product, outputs an estimate of the user’s EDC footprint (mass) and ranks the contribution of each product to the footprint. When used by a group of 39 citizen scientists across the Susquehanna River Basin in the northeastern United States, the average household EDC footprint was ~150 g. Results of this tool aid in decision making by providing users with the information necessary to reduce the household’s footprint through product selection that avoids specific ingredients or by replacing the top-ranking products with greener alternatives.

Decision Support Tools for Water Quality Management

“…The tenth paper-"Development and Demonstration of an Endocrine-Disrupting Compound Footprint Calculator" [35] (https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/14/10/1587 (accessed on 20 May 2022)) by Rachel Taylor, Kathryn Hayden, Marc Gluberman, Laura Garcia, Serap Gorucu, Bryan Swistock, and Heather Preisendanz"-addresses an important topic in municipal water supply decision support. Few wastewater treatment plants were designed to remove chemicals in commonly used personal care products; hence, many of these products and their metabolites persist in plant effluent.…”