Polychlorinated Biphenyls in the Drinking Water Source of the Yangtze River: Characteristics and Risk Assessment

Abstract

Background As the longest river in Asia, the Yangtze River flows through the most industrialized cities in China and provides critical ecological services for agriculture, industry, and transportation.Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have been banned for many years, but trace amounts of PCBs still exist as persistent organic pollutant in drinking water and are an ecotoxicological problem. In this work, we collected water, sediment, and suspended particulate matter (SPM) samples along the Yangtze River, to study the distribution and transport of PCBs for the risk assessment of the Yangtze River as a drinking water source.

Occurrence and risk assessment of emerging contaminants in a water reclamation and ecological reuse project

“…Many studies have shown that secondary effluent from WWTPs can often meet most of these criteria, and effluent from effective tertiary or advanced treatment processes can basically meet the requirements very well (Jin et al, 2013;Sun et al, 2016). However, more and more studies indicated that many emerging contaminants in wastewater and rivers may pose risks to human and aquatic ecology including pesticides (Wang et al, 2017a;Zheng et al, 2016), PCBs (Cui et al, 2020), pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) (Ben et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018), endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) (Tan et al, 2018), disinfection by-products (DBPs) (Li et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2017b) and pathogenic contaminants (Vadde et al, 2019). These studies generally focused on the occurrence, fate, transport and toxicity of one or several types of emerging contaminants in one site such as surface water, drinking water and WWTPs.…”

“…The increasing detection in water systems and studies on their toxicity have raised public and researchers' concern for safety of emerging contaminants in water systems. Although several recent studies (Cui et al, 2020;Ghernaout, 2018;Wang et al, 2017b) assessed the risks posed by some emerging contaminants, they are mainly focused on portable reuse or drinking water sources and associated environmental risks. By far, studies on systematic assessments of risks to human health and aquatic ecology brought by their toxicity in ecological water reuse systems, were urgently needed.…”