Evaluation of Contamination Level of Dnieper River Basin by Organic and Inorganic Toxicants

The Dnieper river is the most important source for production of drinking water in Ukraine. Despite that, its quality seriously deteriorated within the last decades due to an excessive and uncontrolled pollution from numerous sources. Former and present discharges are being accumulated in sediments and ground water, i.e., can penetrate into the drinking water resources. The most threatening is the fact that there are no systematic data on the nature of the organic pollutants. As a result, environmental managers and politicians do not have any information in case they need to make decisions on water quality and, at present, no one knows the actual ecological state of the river basin. Systematic analytical investigations on isolation, concentration, identification and determination of trace amounts of volatile and semivolatile organic compounds in natural, drinking and mine waters were carried out using chromatographic and mass-spectrometric methods. The data on actual state of pollution of surface, drinking waters and sediments of the Dnieper river by volatile and semivolatile organic substances (THM, organochlorine pesticides, α-, β-, γ-BHC, DDE, DDD, DDT, organophosphorus pesticides, metaphor, carbophos, rogor, phtalates, chlorophenols, PAHs, PCBs, etc.) have been generalized. A special attention was paid to industrial pollutants that, in terms of toxicity and amounts discharged, represent the most serious threat to the ecology of the Dnieper river basin. The major focus of this chapter is the identification and determination of toxic compounds in mine, surface and drinking water samples in the Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk-Zaporozhie-Nikopol regions by chromatographic and mass-spectrometric (CG/FID, GC/ECD, GC/MS, MS, HPLC/FLU, HPLC/REF) methods at the levels as low as µg/1, ng/1 and pg/l.