Abstract
During the 1980s, whole effluent toxicity testing was incorporated into the regulatory control program for municipal and industrial effluents in the USA, as a complement to chemical-specific limitations. While regulating effluent toxicity offered several advantages, it also required the development of means to identify and control sources of toxicity within effluents, which could include toxicants not previously monitored or even known. To meet this need, the US Environmental Protection Agency developed an effects-directed analysis procedure called “toxicity identification evaluation”. This involved a suite of physical/chemical manipulations that are applied to aliquots of a toxic effluent sample, and the relative effects of these manipulations on effluent toxicity are used to infer the type of toxicant(s) responsible for toxicity, and to guide their isolation and analytical identification. This chapter provides an overview of these methods and their component phases: I – Characterization, II – Identification, and III – Confirmation. Case examples of toxicant identification in effluents from municipal and industrial sources are discussed, along with a broad summary of the types of toxicants identified, and the characteristics of those toxicants that helped guide their assessment.
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Notes
- 1.
While WET testing is a powerful tool, it is important to note that its ability to detect the effects of toxic chemicals is limited to the types of effects that can be measured in the toxicity test procedures used. As such, effects such as those on secondary consumers mediated through food chain transfer, on life stages not tested, or on organisms more sensitive than those tested, may not be detected and must be evaluated by other means.
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Ankley, G.T., Hockett, J.R., Mount, D.I., Mount, D.R. (2011). Early Evolution of the Toxicity Identification Evaluation Process: Contributions from the United States Environmental Protection Agency Effluent Testing Program. In: Brack, W. (eds) Effect-Directed Analysis of Complex Environmental Contamination. The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry(), vol 15. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18384-3_1
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