Occurrence and source apportionment of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the Beiyun River of Beijing, China

Highlights

• 15 Different PPCPs were detected in the Beiyun River of Beijing.

• Caffeine was the predominant compound in water samples.

• The contamination levels are moderate on a global scale.

• PPCP concentrations showed spatial and seasonal variations.

• Freshly discharged untreated sewage significantly contributed to PPCP’s occurrence in the Beiyun River.

Abstract

This work investigates, for the first time, the occurrence and sources of 15 pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in surface water of Beijing, one of most densely populated cities in the world, in three sampling events representing different seasonal flow conditions. The detection frequencies of most PPCPs were in the range of 50–100%. The median concentrations of the selected PPCPs ranged from not detected to 4200 ng L⁻¹ (caffeine). Generally, higher PPCP levels were observed in early spring, indicating both low flow condition and cold-water temperature might enhance their persistence. Source apportionment showed freshly discharged untreated sewage (67%) significantly contributed to the PPCP burden in the Beiyun River, which provides important information for environmental management.

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.