Pollution & Environmental Risk science area at CEH

CEH's new Science Strategy identifies three interdependent, major societal and environmental challenges: Securing the Value of Nature, Building Resilience to Environmental Hazards, and Managing Environmental Change. We're delivering our strategy by Science Areas and underpinning activities, and over the next few weeks we are profiling these on our blog.

This post focuses on our Pollution & Environmental Risk Science Area led by Professor Richard Shore. Through this area, CEH will provide scientific evidence and risk assessment for sustainable management of chemicals while protecting people and the environment.

Chemicals include pharmaceuticals, radionuclides, macronutrients, trace elements and organic and inorganic pollutants. The development, manufacture and use of chemicals contributes billions of pounds to the UK economy per annum, yet they can have hazardous properties that pose risks to human health, food production and the environment.

Solardomes at CEH's Bangor research site: state-of-the-art exposure
facilities to study the impacts of ozone on a range of plant species.

CEH research objectives include short and long-term monitoring to quantify concentrations, pools, fluxes and impacts of key environmental pollutants.

‘Down the drain’ chemicals – how exposed are the world’s rivers? New blog post http://t.co/L7AzB4hD3i #pollution #environment
— CEH Science News (@CEHScienceNews) February 6, 2014

We study pollutant transport, fate, exposure, effects to discover or predict impact on organisms, human health, ecosystems and their services. We aim to reduce uncertainty with which we predict environmental dynamics, bioavailability and impacts of environmental pollutants, improve hazard screening and risk assessment processes for current and emerging technologies and provide training, tools and approaches for the more realistic assessment of environmental exposure concentrations and risks from manufactured nanomaterials.

@CEHScienceNews Claus Svendson #NanoFATEproject @unibirmingham overseeing @QualityNano training school on dosing nanoparticles into soil.
— Iseult Lynch (@iseult5) March 7, 2014

CORDIS spotlight on nanoparticles' imperceptible effects http://t.co/ehmhD1FCD0 related to project work carried out at CEH
— CEH Science News (@CEHScienceNews) October 4, 2013

CEH runs the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme, a long-term, national monitoring scheme that quantifies the concentrations of contaminants in the livers and eggs of selected species of predatory and fish-eating birds in Britain. We monitor the levels of contaminants to determine how and why they vary between species and regions, how they are changing over time, and the effects that they may have on individual birds and on their populations.

Here's our co-paper showing elevated PBDE + PCBs in urban v rural dippers http://t.co/oKuYk3gEZL @CEHScienceNews pic.twitter.com/A9VUXDP1Le
— Steve Ormerod (@SteveOrmerod) July 22, 2013

Sparrowhawk study suggests why PBDE contaminant levels vary - http://t.co/10mTl3x7qq in Science for Env Policy @SfEP
— CEH Science News (@CEHScienceNews) July 5, 2013

The Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme is also a part of the WILDCOMS collaborative network, formed between the various UK surveillance schemes that monitor disease and contaminants in vertebrate wildlife.

WILDCOMS UK surveillance schemes network monitoring disease & contaminants in vertebrate wildlife: Annual Report http://t.co/XxtREEYfIJ
— CEH Science News (@CEHScienceNews) January 28, 2014

CEH also has a well-established international reputation in radioecology research, the study of the behaviour of radioactive elements in the environment and measuring exposure to radiation of humans and other organisms.

Temporary storage site for radioactive waste at Kawauchi, Japan. In October 2013 Dr Brenda Howard
of CEH was part of an International Atomic Energy Agency international expert mission to
review remediation efforts in areas affected by the Fukushima Daiichi accident.

Read more about our Pollution & Environmental Risk Science Area, including a Science Area Summary [PDF], on the CEH website.

Additional information

CEH Science Strategy 2014-2019

Staff page of Professor Richard Shore, Pollution & Environmental Risk Science Area Lead

How exposed are the world’s rivers to pollutant chemicals discharged from domestic sources?

CEH scientists Andrew Johnson, Virginie Keller and Richard Williams blog about their new paper examining pollution in the world’s rivers.

All around the world we use more and more chemicals in toothpaste, drugs, shampoo, hormones for cancer treatment and as a means of contraception. All these chemicals go "down-the-drain" and a proportion escape from sewage treatment plants before entering rivers and potentially affecting wildlife. A good example is the issue of sex hormones discharged by the human population resulting in male fish displaying female characteristics (e.g. egg proteins in their blood, egg sites in their testes), which caused alarm around the world.

One way of finding out the scale of national exposure to such chemicals is to get chemists to test for every chemical in every river in their country. Such monitoring campaigns are extremely challenging and very costly to carry out. Even in countries such as the UK, which has a small geographical area and leads the world in environmental monitoring, the level of effort required is difficult to sustain. For developing nations the expense of such monitoring campaigns means such information and knowledge is beyond reach.

Our new study, recently published as an open access paper in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, used a geographic-based model which compares population with river flow to assess the available natural dilution for the human wastes that contain chemicals. The less dilution available within a nation, the higher the exposure levels to these chemicals will be.

As we all know rainfall patterns can vary dramatically throughout the year, and from year to year. The model used long-term annual and monthly averages of river flow (based on up to 60 years of measured rainfall) to generate a range of dilution factors.

Many nations have poorly populated and densely populated regions. Thus, for each nation, a variety of dilution factors were examined (expressed as a range of percentiles). The spatial variability of the dilution factors can vary considerably depending on the percentiles – defining low to high flows – and types of flow considered (annual or monthly).

Predicted values of national annual median (50%ile) dilution factor

The results are interesting. In Europe, the UK median dilution factor of 37 puts it in the upper third of nations exposed to domestic chemicals. However, the 25%ile results – a measure of low flow dilution – give the UK a dilution factor of only 6, making it the most exposed country. This is a consequence of our relatively dry summers and high population densities in the South and Midlands. By way of contrast the French median dilution factor is 76 and 25%ile dilution factor is 47. This tells us that French fish have a lot less to worry about than British fish!

The paper is open access so readers can look up their exposure to chemicals by examining the tables we’ve created. We hope that environmentalists and regulators from countries across the world, as well as the general public, are able to use the results, to better address this important issue.

Andrew Johnson, Virginie Keller and Richard Williams

Additional information

The full paper reference is:

Keller V.D.J., Williams, R.J., Lofthouse, C., Johnson, A.C. (2014). Worldwide estimation of river concentrations of any chemical originating from sewage-treatment plants using dilution factors.
Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 33, 447-452. doi: 10.1002/etc.2441

Staff page of Professor Andrew Johnson

Staff page of Richard Williams