Development of Water Quality Criteria for Toxic Organic Pollutants

Nitrobenzene, phenanthrene (PHE), benzo[a]pyrene (BaP), triclosan (TCS), and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) are toxic organic pollutants in water ecosystem. However, there is still rare study on water quality criteria (WQC) in China for them. By gathering published toxicity data and conducting toxicity test of them with Chinese aquatic species, the dataset of these pollutants were obtained. Then, the method of species sensitivity distributions (SSD) developed by United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) was mainly applied to derive criterion maximum concentration (CMC) and criterion continuous concentration (CCC), respectively. For nitrobenzene, CMC and CCC are 0.018 mg/L and 0.001 mg/L, respectively. For PHE, CMC and CCC are 0.0514 mg/L and 0.0186 mg/L, respectively. For BaP, CMC and CCC are 0.73 μg/L and 0.38 μg/L, respectively. For TCS, CMC and CCC are 0.009 mg/L and 0.002 mg/L, respectively; for PFOS, CMC and CCC are 32.24 µg/L and 4.56 µg/L, respectively. Besides, SSD differences between native and non-native species were compared to decide which species are more sensitive to a certain pollutant.