Sampling in the Great Lakes for pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and endocrine-disrupting substances using the passive polar organic chemical integrative sampler

Abstract

The passive polar organic chemical integrative sampler in the pharmaceutical configuration (i.e., pharmaceutical-POCIS) was calibrated for sampling at water temperatures of 5, 15 and 25°C to determine the influence of temperature on chemical-specific sampling rates (RS), thus providing more robust estimates of the time-weighted average concentrations of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) and endocrine-disrupting substances (EDS) in surface water. The effect of water temperature and flow on the RS of these analytes was evaluated in the laboratory with a static system. The loss of the test compounds from water by uptake into POCIS was linear over an 8-d period, and these experimental data yielded RS values in the range of 0.07 to 2.46 L/d across the temperature range for the 30 compounds tested. Water temperature and flow influenced POCIS uptake rates, but these effects were relatively small, which is consistent with the theory for uptake into POCIS samplers. Therefore, under a narrow range of water temperatures and flows, it may not be necessary to adjust the RS for POCIS. Except for acidic drugs and sulfonamide antibiotics, RS values were positively correlated with octanol–water partition coefficients (log KOW) of the test compounds. A linear relationship was also observed between RS and chromatographic retention times on a C18 reversed-phase column. These observations may provide a rapid method for estimating the RS of additional chemicals in the POCIS. The application of the RS to POCIS deployed for one month in Lake Ontario, Canada, during the summers of 2006 and 2008 yielded estimates of PPCP and EDS concentrations that are consistent with conventional concentration measurements of these compounds in Lake Ontario surface water. Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 2010;29:751–762. © 2009 SETAC