Suspect screening of REACH'S chemicals in environmental samples

摘要

Over 310.000 chemical substances are registered and regulated via national and international authorities globally, and new substances enter the market continuously. Most of these chemicals are not monitored in the environment. Only 8% of the chemicals that are produced in volumes over 1000 tons per year are part of Dutch monitoring and screening programs and for chemicals with production volumes of 100-1000 tons, this fraction is even lower (3%). For priority substances, monitored fractions are higher, but still less than half is covered (22-47%). Chemicals' legislation in the European Union aims to control risks to humans and the environment to ensure safe use of chemicals. Currently, the assessment of chemicals is based on the ratio of predicted environmental concentrations (PEC) and predicted no effect concentrations (PNEC). The objective of this study is to test if and how broad screening analyses of environmental samples can be applied to provide additional information on occurrence of chemicals for further evaluation or risk management. Broad screening data of environmental samples obtained with liquid chromatography coupled to high resolution accurate mass spectrometry [2] were matched with 2402 chemicals with 1846 unique elemental compositions. This matching can be considered "suspect screening" [3]. The selected chemicals had production volumes of 100-1000 tons or were part of priority lists. The selected samples consisted of nine surface waters and effluents of wastewater treatment plants all sampled in spring and summer of 2014. The appraoch resulted in 402 matching elemental compositions in the samples. The matching elemental compositions of surface waters were qualitatively and quantitatively different that the wastewater effluents (Figure 1). We were not able to identify the observed suspects within the current study, but the applied screening approach can guide further evaluation of chemicals by triggering in-depth studies of specific REACH dossiers as well as further identification and quanntification efforts of the observed suspects.