Occurrence and source apportionment of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the Beiyun River of Beijing, China
Introduction
In recent years, presence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in the aquatic environment has been considered as one of the most urgent environmental concerns (Jones et al., 2001). In the broadest sense, PPCPs consist of prescription drugs, non-prescription drugs, and consumer chemicals including fragrances and sun-screen agents. When these compounds enter aquatic ecosystems via multiple pathways including human excretion, drug disposal, and agricultural runoff associated with therapeutic treatment of livestock (Jorgensen, 2000), they potentially pose harmful effects to both aquatic organisms and humans via direct or indirect exposure (Stackelberg et al., 2004).
PPCPs have been widely detected in the waters of USA, UK, Spain, Japan, Korea, Costa Rican and Thailand with concentrations varying from ng L−1 to μg L−1 and their occurrence in water vary greatly across regions (Kolpin et al., 2004, Nakada et al., 2007, Kasprzyk-Hordern et al., 2008, Fernández et al., 2010, Yoon et al., 2010, Spongberg et al., 2011, Tewari et al., 2013). China, as the world’s largest producer and consumer of PPCP products, consumes more than 25 000 tons of antibiotics each year (Richardson et al., 2005). China is also among the top three countries with the largest personal care product consumption, together with America and Japan (ChinaIRN, 2012). While occurrences of PPCPs in the ambient water environment have been reported in some cities of China (Bu et al., 2013), such information is scarce in surface water of Beijing, the capital city of China, which is one of the most heavily populated cities in Asia with over 20 million people. Resulting from the large population, Beijing has become one of the largest pharmaceutical consumption regions in China as well as in the whole world. The daily wastewater load of Beijing is around 3.3 million tons, but wastewater treatment capacity is only 50% and 83% for the suburb area and urban area, respectively. Therefore, a large amount of wastewater is directly discharged into the Beiyun River without entering into wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The extensive usage of PPCPs and large discharge of wastewaters indicate great release of PPCPs into the Beiyun River. In view of this, this study was conducted to get the picture of PPCP’s occurrence and distribution in the water environment of Beijing by investigation fifteen PPCPs in the Beiyun River and its four main tributaries. Since the identification of pollution source is very important for taking better countermeasures against PPCP pollution, source apportionment analyses were carried out for the first time using principal component analyses (PCA) with multiple linear regression (MLR) based on the profiles of target compounds to interpret the contribution from different sources to total PPCPs burden in the Beiyun River.
Section snippets
Chemicals and reagents
Standards of 15 PPCPs, bezafibrate (BF), caffeine (CF), carbamazepine (CBZ), chloramphenicol (CP), diclofenac (DF), gemfibrozil (GF), indometacin (IM), ketoprofen (KP), mefenamic acid (MA), metoprolol (MTP), nalidixic acid (NA), propranolol (PPN), sulpiride (SP), trimethoprim (TP), N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide (DEET) were purchased from Sigma–Aldrich (Steinheim, Germany). The physicochemical properties of each PPCP compound are shown in Table S1 (Supplementary material). The internal standards of
Occurrence of PPCPs
The detection frequencies and concentrations of PPCPs are shown in Table 1. Fourteen PPCPs were all detected in 30 sampling sites with detection frequencies greater than 50% except PPN, which was not detected in June and September. Generally, concentrations of all selected PPCPs were typically in the ng L−1 level. CF was detected at the highest levels in the surface water with median concentration up to 4200 ± 4415 ng L−1 (median ± interquartile range [IQR]) in March. DEET was found to be the compound
Conclusions
The present study investigated the occurrence and sources of 15 selected PPCPs in the surface water of the Beiyun River. The concentrations of detected PPCPs were typically in the ng L−1 level. The contamination levels are moderate on a global scale compared with previously reported data. Concentrations of selected PPCPs in dry season water samples were generally higher, which was mainly due to the low flow conditions and cold-water temperatures. Source apportionment showed that more than 60% of
Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21207076), Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program, Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2013M530640).
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