“…However, they were substantially lower than those in sewage sludge (Takada et al, 1994;Luo et al, 2008), suspended particles in river water from the PRD , Sumidagawa River and Tamagawa River (Takada and Ishiwatari, 1987), as well as sediments from Dongguan , Zhujiang River (Luo et al, 2008), Dongjiang River (Luo et al, 2008), Arakawa River (Takada et al, 1992), Sumidagawa River and Tamagawa River (Takada and Ishiwatari, 1987), Chaohu Lake , the coastal zones of Guangdong Province (Liu et al, 2013a), Victoria Harbor (Hong et al, 1995), Tokyo Bay (Takada et al, 1992), Jakarta Bay (Rinawati et al, 2012), Santa Monica Bay (Venkatesan et al, 2010), and South and Southern Asia (Isobe et al, 2004). The greater RLAB concentrations in the sediments of the Pearl River Delta (PRD; 1.5-2330 ng/g) and Chaohu Lake (19-5720 ng/g) were attributed to direct discharge of untreated or partially treated domestic wastewater and proximity to input sources (Luo et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2012). However, lower levels of RLAB in the present study may implicate light sewage contamination in the continental shelf of China, likely due to the long distance between the sampling sites and terrestrial input sources and the strong hydrophobicity of LABs leading to their preferable deposition in nearshore areas .…”