THE IMPACT OF EMERGING CONTAMINANTS TO THE ENVIRONMENT AND HUMAN HEALTH


Emerging contaminants are consistently and indirectly manufactured for global use and have now been found in all corners of the earth - in the water, soil, air, and biota. Agilent spoke to two of its research partners across the globe to understand the risk of these contaminants in each region.


Introduction:


Over the last century, the world has industrialized and urbanized at an extremely quick rate. While industrial and urban development has led to many benefi ts in society, the potential impact to our environment, and subsequently our human health, is slowly emerging. Advances in scientifi c research and technology in recent years have led to the widespread detection of ‘emerging contaminants’, which are chemical substances or compounds that are potentially threatening to environmental or human health, introduced by human activities in most cases such as perfl uorinated compounds, water disinfection byproducts, gasoline additives, pharmaceuticals, man-made nanomaterials, microplastics and UV-fi lters.1


Many emerging contaminants have been in the environment for long periods of time but concerns over their presence and potential impact have often only recently been raised. Currently, little is known about many of these contaminants and most remain unregulated.2,3


To understand more about this problem, Agilent interviewed two of its research partners from across the United States and Europe who shared their research and insights into this signifi cant environmental challenge:


Exploring the increasing prevalence of emerging contaminants in US waters


We start with Professor Edward Kolodziej, whose research group at the University of Washington is working to characterize emerging contaminant fate and transport, and focuses in particular on understanding chemicals with adverse effects on fi sh that are present in urban storm waters and roadway runoff. Recently, they have analysed the chemical composition of roadway runoff, by applying high resolution mass spectrometry techniques to identify and characterize unknown chemicals in storm water sample types.


Tarun: Why is studying unknown or unregulated chemicals in the environment important?


Professor Edward Kolodziej: Unknown or unregulated chemicals are important because some of these contaminants induce adverse effects on biological organisms and humans. Particularly for sublethal impacts on growth, immune function, reproduction, neurodevelopment, endocrine signalling, etc, there still seems to be many not yet explained effects that arise when aquatic organisms are exposed to complex mixtures of human chemicals. We need to better understand these exposures and their implications to improve our management of environmental quality. Knowing what these chemicals are in these mixtures seems a good fi rst step.


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Tarun: Can you tell us about the research you and your team uncovered relating to the deaths of the coho salmon population in Puget Sound’s urban streams? What was the cause of death for this species?


Professor Edward Kolodziej: For decades there have existed unexplained observations of water quality linked acute mortality in adult coho salmon after rainstorms in the Western US. When I arrived at the University of Washington in 2014, I was able to start collaborating with an excellent team of researchers to try and understand what was in the water when those salmon were dying.


Over time, our data and collaborative efforts led us closer and closer to roadway runoff and tire-rubber derived chemical contaminants as being important to this fi sh mortality phenomena. Once our ecotoxicology collaborators demonstrated acute mortality of juvenile coho salmon after exposure to a tire rubber leachate, we used an effects directed analysis approach to fractionate those samples chemically. This effort allowed our team to be the fi rst to identify a highly toxic transformation product of 6PPD, which is an antioxidant chemical widely used in tires.4


6PPD reacts with ozone,


as intended to protect the tire rubber, to produce a transformation product which then leaches into water. Unfortunately, coho salmon are especially sensitive to this transformation product, it’s really lethal to them, indicating the importance of screening for bioactive transformation products in environmental systems, especially for sensitive or ecologically important species.


Professor Edward Kolodziej, Associate Professor of Civil &


Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington, Division of Sciences and Mathematics, University of Washington- Tacoma, and Principal Investigator, Center for Urban Waters, Tacoma, WA


Dr. Leon Barron, Reader in Analytical & Environmental Sciences, Imperial College London


Tarun: How did these contaminants seep into the water and where did they originally come from?


Professor Edward Kolodziej: Bits of rubber and the chemicals in them don’t disappear when they get out into the environment. These rubber particles leach chemicals into rainwater, and those get into our rivers and streams. Our efforts helped close the mass balance on a common antioxidant used in tire rubbers; we just started paying attention to a product that wasn’t previously characterized in the environmental literature because the coho salmon were telling us it was important.


Tarun: What kind of research methods/instrumentation did you use to carry out your experiment?


Professor Edward Kolodziej: We use an Agilent 1290 UPLC and a 6530 QTOF-HRMS for primary sample characterization. The unbiased approach to sample screening and characterization was great; the instrument was telling us what was actually there instead of what we thought might be there. Thus, it provided the key analytical breakthrough for us to unlock the problem and fi gure out what was in that roadway runoff and tire rubber leachate that was important to watch.


Tarun: Is there anything we can do to mitigate the use of these emerging contaminants?


Professor Edward Kolodziej: We need to consider improving our ability to screen and simplify the chemical ingredients of our common consumer products. There is a signifi cant mass of unknown chemicals hitting the environment everywhere, and we are trying to get a handle on what that means for biology so we can sort out the bad actors from the good. Building from a product sustainability and environmental safety perspective would seem like a good start, these are fundamental principles of green chemistry that need to be applied more widely.


River chemical monitoring at scale using new 3D-printing technology developed at Imperial with Agilent


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