Sampling in the Great Lakes for pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and endocrine‐disrupting substances using the passive polar organic chemical integrative sampler

Abstract

The passive polar organic chemical integrative sampler in the pharmaceutical configuration (i.e., pharmaceutical-POCIS) was calibrated for sampling at water temperatures of 5, 15 and 25 degrees C to determine the influence of temperature on chemical-specific sampling rates (R(S)), thus providing more robust estimates of the time-weighted average concentrations of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) and endocrine-disrupting substances (EDS) in surface water. The effect of water temperature and flow on the R(S) of these analytes was evaluated in the laboratory with a static system. The loss of the test compounds from water by uptake into POCIS was linear over an 8-d period, and these experimental data yielded R(S) values in the range of 0.07 to 2.46 L/d across the temperature range for the 30 compounds tested. Water temperature and flow influenced POCIS uptake rates, but these effects were relatively small, which is consistent with the theory for uptake into POCIS samplers. Therefore, under a narrow range of water temperatures and flows, it may not be necessary to adjust the R(S) for POCIS. Except for acidic drugs and sulfonamide antibiotics, R(S) values were positively correlated with octanol-water partition coefficients (log K(OW)) of the test compounds. A linear relationship was also observed between R(S) and chromatographic retention times on a C18 reversed-phase column. These observations may provide a rapid method for estimating the R(S) of additional chemicals in the POCIS. The application of the R(S) to POCIS deployed for one month in Lake Ontario, Canada, during the summers of 2006 and 2008 yielded estimates of PPCP and EDS concentrations that are consistent with conventional concentration measurements of these compounds in Lake Ontario surface water.

Analysis of drugs of abuse in wastewater from two Canadian cities

“…The temperatures of the untreated wastewater at WWTP-S and WWTP-L were in this range over the sampling period, but temperatures of treated wastewater were in the range of 8-12°C. However, our previous studies have shown that sampling rates for POCIS do not vary widely with temperature, water flow, pH and dissolved organic content (Li et al, 2010a(Li et al, , 2010b(Li et al, , 2011. Overall, it appears that passive sampling using POCIS in complex matrices such as untreated wastewater would require different calibration approaches such as the in situ calibration suggested by Harman et al (2011) in order to obtain data on concentrations that can be reliably used to estimate community drug consumption.…”

“…Procedures for this experiment were based on work previously reported by Macleod et al (2007), with some modifications reported by Li et al (2010a). Briefly, static experiments were conducted in triplicate in 4-L amber glass bottles situated in a temperature-controlled environmental chamber set to 20°C for a period of eight days.…”

“…POCIS samplers collected from the municipal WWTP and from the calibration experiment were extracted as described previously by Li et al (2010a). Briefly, the POCIS samplers were removed from the freezer and rinsed gently under water.…”

“…POCIS provides estimates of the time-weighted average concentration of compounds accumulated from aqueous matrices into a solid sorbent over the time of deployment (Jones-Lepp et al, 2004;Li et al, 2010a;Harman et al, 2011). This method may provide more accurate estimates of the average concentrations of drugs in wastewater over time than estimates obtained from grab or even 24-h composite samples.…”

Carbon Nanotube Integrative Sampler (CNIS) for passive sampling of nanosilver in the aquatic environment

“…To determine the sampling rates expressed as the volume of water (mL) cleared of silver 150 per day, static non-renewal experiments were conducted using procedures based on methods 151 described by Li et al, (2010) and MacLeod et al, (2007). In one set of experiments with the CNIS-152…”