Effect-based analysis of urban stormwater (2024-2025)

Urban stormwater transports a complex cocktail of organic chemicals from a variety of sources in the urban environment. Targeted analysis of particular chemicals has demonstrated the presence of hundreds of different organic chemicals in studies of urban stormwater from across the world. However, given that hundreds of thousands of organic chemicals are registered on the market in Europe alone (a number that is continuously increasing), and that these chemicals may form an unknown number of degradation products after their introduction into the environment, the known pollutants likely only represent the tip of the iceberg of true environmental hazard.

Recently, bioanalytical methods based on cell assays have been developed in order to characterize the biological effect of chemical mixtures. These methods provide a more complete measure of environmental hazard and can be complementary to chemical analysis. However, they have very rarely been used to characterize urban stormwater. In this project, a panel of cell-based assays, which consider different biological endpoints, will be tested for different types of urban stormwater (runoff from a large industrial catchments, parking lot runoff, roof runoff) and sediment from stormwater treatment facilities, all have which have undergone targeted analysis for organic contaminants in previous work. The project will both allow these methods to be tested on new environmental matrices and consider the extent to which contaminants identified as priority pollutants in urban stormwater represent the biological effects as represented by cell-based assays.

The project with a budget of 650 000 SEK is funded by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and the results will be presented in a report at the end of the project.