Characterisation and comparison of the uptake of ionizable and polar pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products by POCIS and Chemcatchers

Abstract

Growing concern about the environmental impact of ionizable and polar organic chemicals such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products has lead to the inclusion of some in legislative and regulatory frameworks. It is expected that future monitoring requirements for these chemicals in aquatic environments will increase, along with the need for low cost monitoring and risk assessment strategies. In this study the uptake of 13 neutral and 6 ionizable pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products by modified POCIS (with Strata™-X sorbent) and Chemcatchers™ (SDB-RPS or SDB-XC) was investigated under controlled conditions at pH = 6.5 for 26 days. The modified POCIS and Chemcatcher™ (SDB-RPS) samplers exhibited similar performance with the uptake of the majority of the 19 chemicals of interest categorised as linear over the 26 day deployment. Only a few ionized herbicides (picloram and dicamba) and triclosan showed negligible accumulation. Chemcatcher™ with SDB-XC sorbent performed relatively poorly with only carbamazepine having a linear accumulation profile, and 8 compounds showing no measurable accumulation. Differences in the uptake behavior of chemicals were not easily explained by their physico-chemical properties, strengthening the requirement for detailed calibration data. PES membranes accumulated significant amount of some compounds (i.e. triclosan and diuron), even after extended deployment (i.e. 26 days). At present there is no way to predict which compounds will demonstrate this behavior. Increasing membrane pore size from 0.2 to 0.45 μm for Chemcatcher™ (SBD-RPS) caused an average increase in Rs of 24%.

Overview of the Chemcatcher® for the passive sampling of various pollutants in aquatic environments Part A: Principles, calibration, preparation and analysis of the sampler

“…Static renewal -The spiked exposure medium is periodically removed and renewed (daily or several day frequency) to ensure minimal compound depletion. 26-day exposures were realized by Kaserzon et al [33] with solution refreshments on days 3, 10 and 17. This procedure necessitates frequent grab samplings, at least before and after each water renewal.…”

Passive sampling of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in aquatic environments

“…A standard calibration procedure is still lacking and different approaches often involve the use of original laboratory devices, which results in variability in the determined R S values. Even though it is also virtually impossible to consider all the factors operating in the field, laboratory calibration is still the most popular method for evaluating R S (Bartelt-Hunt et al 2011;Li et al 2011;Miege et al 2012;Morin et al 2013;Vallejo et al 2013;Amdany et al 2014a;Bayen et al 2014;Belles et al 2014;Di Carro et al 2014;Kaserzon et al 2014). In situ calibration, at specific sites is more reliable but so far has rarely been used (Harman et al 2011;Jacquet et al 2012;Miege et al 2012;Shi et al 2014) because of the complexity of the process.…”

“…POCIS are also deployed in agricultural watersheds (Jairnes-Correa et al 2015), areas of pharmaceutical industrial activity or hospital effluents (Bailly et al 2013), to investigate the degree of contamination by particular pollutants. Spiked water samples and laboratory tests are commonly used in studies on the kinetics of uptake of new micropollutants and evaluation of various physical effects on the sampler or the characterization of the innovative features of future POCIS (Li et al 2011;Carlson et al 2013;Morin et al 2013;Belles et al 2014;Kaserzon et al 2014). These approaches often include a range of analytes with different physical-chemical properties (basic, acidic, phenolic and neutral) which provide a better insight into the new samplers' efficiency for monitoring various analytes.…”

“…In some cases, both the receiving phases (HLB and triphasic) are deployed together to combine the advantages offered by the different mechanisms and so increase the chance of attracting more analytes (Cernoch et al 2012;Jarosova et al 2012;Liscio et al 2014). Kaserzon et al 2014 recently used POCIS containing a polymeric reverse phase, the Strata-X™ , to study the kinetics of uptake of several ionizable and polar pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Strata-X™ sorbent performed similarly to Chemcatcher™ (SDB-RPS) and are both suitable monitoring tools.…”

“…Fixed ratio of solvents (dichloromethane: MeOH: toluene, 8:1:1) is common for POCISPest sorbent extraction. Kaserzon et al (2014) describe a procedure for extraction of Strata-X™ sorbent using MeOH, acetonitrile and acetone. POCIS containing MCX and MAX sorbents can be eluted using MeOH with an addition of 5% ammonium hydroxide and 2% formic acid, respectively (Li et al 2011).…”