Presented by Rainer Lohmann - Professor of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography - at the 2018 Emerging Contaminants in the Aquatic Environment Conference.

Some of the most notorious organic contaminants are persistent, bioaccumulative and hydrophobic, including PCBs and organochlorine pesticides, such as DDT. Yet many emerging contaminants in water possess very different physico-chemical properties and pathways. Per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances in particular are at least as persistent as PCBs, also bioaccumulate but are much more soluble in water. Both are of concern to humans near contaminated sites, but also pose risks in the remote Arctic environment. By relying on passive sampling, we have been studying the transport, fate and traced the bioaccumulation of persistent contaminants at scales ranging from the heavily contaminated Passaic River (NJ) to the remote Arctic region. In the Passaic River, food-web dynamics of legacy contaminants were strongly influences by contaminants residing in sediment and porewater. By and large, these legacy pollutants scale with population density. The perflourinated compounds, in contrast, have distinct point sources that are not (yet) scaling with population, implying that abatement and remediation are distinct options.