Introduction to Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment

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Chapter 1

Introduction to Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment: Ecological and Human Health Considerations R. U. Halden*,1,2,3 1School

of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85283, USA 2Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85283, USA 3Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA. *Corresponding author: School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, 1001 South McAllister Avenue, Tempe, AZ 85287-5701. E-mail: [email protected].

In 2010, the American Chemical Society (ACS) published online and in print a new book entitled, “Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment: Ecological and Human Health Considerations.” The present introductory chapter provides a history of key events leading up to this publication. The book contains a number of scientific studies first presented during a 2009 ACS symposium on ‘Emerging Contaminants, Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs), and Organohalogens in Wastewater and Municipal Biosolids’, conducted as part of the 238th National Meeting of the ACS in Washington, D.C. However, the book’s focus is much broader, covering additional environmental media, including groundwater, raw and treated drinking water, runoff from agricultural fields, as well as terrestrial and aquatic biota exposed to contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). Scientific and regulatory information is presented in three major sections: (i) Environmental Sources, Occurrences, and Fate of CECs, (ii) Ecotoxicological and Human Health Risks of CECs, and (iii) Modeling Tools, Research Needs, and Policy © 2010 American Chemical Society Halden; Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment: Ecological and Human Health Considerations ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2010.


Options for Managing CECs. The book comprises some 27 chapters, many of which are written by preeminent experts from government and academia. The book adds to a rapidly growing body of literature on CECs by providing a comprehensive and authoritative, i.e., peer-reviewed, perspective of CECs in the environment and associated human and ecological health concerns. It may serve as a desk reference for the various stakeholders or as a textbook for graduate-level courses examining the connection between human society and the environment, with particular emphasis on the water cycle. Keywords: PPCPs; CECs; emerging contaminants; perfluorinated compounds; organic wastewater compounds; OWCs

In August of 2009, the world’s largest scientific society, the American Chemical Society (ACS), convened its 238th National Meeting in Washington, DC. Leading up to the event, news media across the U.S. had reported on the contamination of aqueous and terrestrial environments, including finished drinking water in several U.S. metropolitan areas, by so-called “emerging” contaminants, or more accurately stated, contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). Among these substances are pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), natural and synthetic hormones, an array of agricultural pesticides, as well as perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) and other persistent and toxic organohalogen compounds (chemicals containing one or more carbon-halogen bonds) produced by modern society. While the presence of natural and manmade, potentially harmful chemicals in the natural and built environment certainly had been known for some time, several recent events had attracted strong media attention for this topic. First, in 2002, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) had published in the leading U.S. journal for the environmental sciences, Environmental Science & Technology, a study showing the presence of pharmaceuticals, hormones, and other organic wastewater contaminants in streams across the U.S., in a national reconnaissance, representing the first of its kind (1). The agency used five newly developed analytical methods to measure concentrations of 95 organic wastewater compounds (OWCs) in surface water samples obtained during 1999 and 2000 from 139 streams across 30 U.S. states. Eighty percent of the streams sampled showed detectable quantities of OWCs and 82 of the 95 target compounds were found in this study (1). Although detected concentrations were generally low and rarely exceeded drinking-water guidelines, drinking-water health advisories, or aquaticlife criteria, the study struck a chord with the scientific community and the general public. Eight years later, the USGS landmark study (1) has been cited over 1,600 times in the peer-reviewed literature, and a U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) literature database now shows over 8,000 publications on PPCPs and related CECs, thus illustrating a tremendous uptick in publishing activity on this topic (2). 2 Halden; Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment: Ecological and Human Health Considerations ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2010.


Second, an unusual effort by the Associated Press had made headlines globally. The AP had commissioned its own investigation into the occurrence of PPCPs in finished drinking water of major U.S. metropolitan areas and, in 2008, reported that the water supply of more than 41 million U.S. citizens contained traces of one or more active pharmaceutical ingredients (3). Third, motivated in part by the extensive media coverage and uncertainty about human health implications of PPCPs in the water supply, the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies, in December of 2008, focused its 6th Workshop of the Standing Committee on Risk Analysis Issues and Reviews on the topic of Characterizing the Potential Human Toxicity from Low Doses of Pharmaceuticals in Drinking Water. The subtitle of this workshop captured pressing concerns regarding the need for management of poorly understood associated human health risks: Are New Risk Assessment Methods or Approaches Required? An invited presentation at the meeting, titled ‘What’s in Our Water?’ pointed to existing knowledge gaps in our understanding of the occurrence and significance of CECs in the water supply (4). Fourth, the issue of so-called “intersex fish” had emerged as a major environmental concern and was being discussed in 2009 at hearings of the U.S. Congress, following reports on the occurrence of eggs in the reproductive system of some 80 percent of male smallmouth bass caught in the Potomac River near locations where municipal sewage treatment plants discharge treated effluent into the river for water reclamation. The 2009 ACS special symposium on “Emerging Contaminants (Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products) and Organohalogens in Wastewater and Municipal Biosolids” was a timely and well attended event, featuring as presenters of platform and poster presentations some of the world’s preeminent researchers in the field. At the conclusion of the symposium, the ACS Press invited the preparation of this book (5), to cover the presented science and additional aspects and contributions from authors who were unable to attend the meeting. The book (5) features chapters organized in three main sections. After the present introduction, it discusses environmental sources, occurrences and fates of CECs. This section provides a comprehensive overview from an international perspective, of the types of CECs present in the environment and detected at various levels in diverse media, ranging from raw sewage to treated wastewater to stabilized municipal sewage sludge fit for application on land (biosolids) to raw and finished drinking water. The second part of the book examines the treatability and persistence of CECs during municipal wastewater treatment and discusses ecotoxicity issues and risk assessments for PPCPs and CECs. The book concludes with a final section, concentrating on policy options and future research needs to manage CECs in the environment and to address human health and ecotoxicological concerns. A number of excellent books have been published previously on pharmaceuticals, personal care products and related emerging contaminants in the environment, e.g., (6–10). The present book (5) provides an update on this important topic and distinguishes itself from prior contributions by its extended aim to integrate other components of contaminant mixtures that are thought 3 Halden; Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment: Ecological and Human Health Considerations ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2010.


to figure prominently into human and ecotoxicological risks posed by CECs: namely organohalogen compounds including perfluorinate, polybrominated and polychlorinated compounds [e.g., (11, 12)] as well as constituents of plastics, exposure to which as been linked to adverse human health effects (13). Emerging contaminants in the environment is an issue that is here to stay. Whereas the rapid transition in focus from one contaminant to another sometimes cynically is being referred to as chasing the ‘contaminant du jour,’ interest in the general topic of environmental trace contaminants and their effects never really has waned and its complexity ensures that it will be of relevance far into the future. It certainly has raised the public’s awareness for the interconnectivity between human lifestyle choices and environmental health, and also has triggered an appreciation for the vulnerability of the water cycle that is under stress from excessive water use and a growing and demographically aging population that is becoming more and more dependent on medications that find their way into the water environment. Thus, the quest for knowledge concerning the impact of trace contaminants in drinking water continues. Just recently, the World Health Organization initiated a working group on PPCPs in drinking water, tasked to consider the human health implications of medical drugs in the water supply and to determine the need for credible healthbased guidance related to this issue. At the same time, the EPA is reexamining its current selection of Superfund priority pollutants to include newly emerging contaminants discussed in depth in this book (5); among these substances are the antimicrobial compounds triclosan and triclocarban as well as the perfluorinated compounds perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoate (PFOA). Many of the lesser known CECs covered in detail in this book (5) recently were discussed at a special workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) that concentrated on underappreciated CECs of the present and the future (14). Various previously unrecognized or under-appreciated pollutants also were identified in the 2009 national sewage sludge survey conducted by the U.S. EPA (15), an important surveillance effort that is presented and analyzed in depth in this book (5). A vexing problem that continues to engage and frustrate scientific and regulatory communities in the industrialized world is the suspected association between environmental trace contaminants and human diseases and conditions observed at the population scale, such as certain types of cancers, early onset of puberty, and various immunological, developmental and neurological disorders; this realization is illustrated in a recent statement by the Endocrine Society (16). Since the first series of Wingspread meetings (17) on endocrine disrupting compounds in the 1990s, research has intensified on the human health impacts of industrial chemicals but many answers are still lacking. Indeed, in the summer of 2010, a follow-up meeting on endocrine disruption occurred again at the Johnson Foundation’s Wingspread Conference Center in Wisconsin near Lake Michigan, to define new and more informative research strategies for better understanding endocrine disruption in humans and animals subjected to chronic, low-level exposure to environmental compounds of concern. It is possible and maybe even likely, that some of the observed adverse outcomes in human and ecological health cannot be explained properly by looking 4 Halden; Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment: Ecological and Human Health Considerations ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2010.

at a single compound or a limited set of related substances. Thus, the content of this book (5) may serve as a foundation for future research aimed to elucidate in greater detail the human health and ecological effects of chronic, low-level environmental exposures to mixtures of harmful substances and the importance of contaminant mixtures for diseases and conditions whose etiologies at present are ill defined.


Acknowledgments The project described was supported in part by Award Number R01ES015445 from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and by the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future. The content is solely the responsibility of the author(s) and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIEHS or the National Institutes of Health.

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Introduction to Contaminants of Emerging Concern in the Environment

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