WP1 Wastewater Treatment Effluents: Endocrine Disrupters and Pharmaceuticals
Wednesday, 16 November 2005: 8:00 AM - 6:30 PM in Exhibit Hall

(SIN-1117-835459) A comprehensive method for the fast screening of selected EPOCs in ground, surface and waste waters.

Singh, Simrat¹, Gardinali, Piero^{1, 2}, ¹ Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA² Southeast Environmental Research Center (SERC), Miami, Florida, USA

ABSTRACT- The release of steroids and pharmaceuticals into the aquatic environment has been extensively documented and studied in recent years. Because of the increased need for reclaimed water it is important to provide a comprehensive and fast screening tool to monitor EPOCs effectively in a large number of samples. Rather than trying to analyze a wide variety of target analytes at higher concentrations this work presents a simple, fast and comprehensive method for the analysis of 20 of the most relevant wastewater contaminants (EPOCs) in a single extraction. The method uses five surrogate standards (-estradiol-d5, progestrone-d9, estrone-d4, caffeine-12c3, and bisphenolA-d16) for the quantification of five of the most commonly detected pharmaceuticals and 15 hormones and steroids. The method involves liquid-liquid extraction of the water sample with methylene chloride, concentration of the final extracts using a stream of clean nitrogen and derivatization using BSTFA. Finally, 2l of the final extract are injected into a Finnigan Trace DSQ GC-MS instrument equipped with a DB-5MS column (30m x 0.25mm x 0.25 m film thickness) and analyzed using a single quadruple mass detector operated in SIM mode. The calculated Method Detection Limit (MDL) for all the compounds analyzed is in between 0.1-2.0 ng/L. The method was applied to treated wastewater and surface water samples collected from different locations in Florida. In general, the results showed that water collected from inland canals and marinas had low concentrations of multiple steroids, pharmaceuticals, and personal care products. The compounds more frequently detected in surface waters were: coprostanol, cholesterol, estrone, caffeine, triclosan and DEET. The concentration ranges of estrone and -estradiol in surface waters were from 0.31 to 5.25 ng/L and the concentration ranges of caffeine and triclosan were between 1.74 to 67.7 ng/L. The concentration ranges for the analytes detected in the treated wastewater effluents were higher (i.e. for estrone it was 1.96 to 65.1 ng/L and for -estradiol it was 0.3 to 6.4 ng/L) and dependent on the treatment processes used to achieve the final effluent.

Key words: steroids, hormones, wastewater