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Triclosan—the forgotten priority substance?

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Abstract

Introduction

Triclosan (TCS) is a multi-purpose biocide. Its wide use in personal care products (PCPs) fosters its dispersal in the aquatic environment. Despite enhanced awareness of both scientists and the public in the last decade with regard to fate and effects, TCS received little attention regarding its prioritisation as a candidate river basin-specific pollutant or even priority substance, due to scarce monitoring data.

Methods

Applying a new prioritisation methodology, the potential risk of TCS was assessed based on a refined hazard assessment and occurrences at 802 monitoring sites in the Elbe River basin.

Results

The suggested acute-based predicted no-effect concentration (PNEC) of 4.7 ng/l for the standard test species Selenastrum capricornutum was in good agreement with effect concentrations in algal communities and was exceeded in the Elbe River basin at 75% of the sites (limit of quantification of 5 ng/l). The 95th percentile of the maximum environmental concentrations at each site exceeded the PNEC by a factor of 12, indicating potential hazards for algal communities. Among 500 potential river basin-specific pollutants which were recently prioritised, triclosan ranks on position 6 of the most problematic substances, based on the Elbe River data alone.

Conclusion

Considering the worldwide application of PCPs containing triclosan, we expect that the TCS problem is not restricted to the Elbe River basin, even if monitoring data from other river basins are scarce. Thus, we suggest to include TCS into routine monitoring programmes and to consider it as an important candidate for prioritisation at the European scale.

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Acknowledgements

The presented prioritisation approach was developed within the NORMAN Association (no. W604002510). The work was supported by the European Commission through the Integrated Project MODELKEY (contract no. 511237GOCE). Peter C. von der Ohe was financially supported through a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) postdoctoral fellowship (PAK 406/1). We would like to acknowledge the Sächsisches Landesamt für Umwelt und Geologie (LfUG, Dresden, Germany), who kindly provided the monitoring data. Tobias Schulze is thanked for valuable suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript. José-Manuel Zaldívar Comenges and Stefania Gottardo provided valuable information on the European prioritisation process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Effect-Directed Analysis, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research–UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Peter Carsten von der Ohe & Werner Brack

  2. Department Bioanalytical Ecotoxicology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research–UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Mechthild Schmitt-Jansen

  3. Environmental Institute, Koŝ, Slovak Republic

    Jaroslav Slobodnik

Authors
  1. Peter Carsten von der Ohe
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  2. Mechthild Schmitt-Jansen
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  3. Jaroslav Slobodnik
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  4. Werner Brack
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Carsten von der Ohe.

Additional information

Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues

Electronic supplementary material

Table S1 contains the summary statistics for each sampling site.

Table S1

Overview of sampling sites with analysis of triclosan, the water body it represents, the years with analysis, the number of samples (n), the maximum concentration (max), the average concentration (average) and the detection frequency (DOC 1,089 kb)

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von der Ohe, P.C., Schmitt-Jansen, M., Slobodnik, J. et al. Triclosan—the forgotten priority substance?. Environ Sci Pollut Res 19, 585–591 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-011-0580-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-011-0580-7

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