Paper Title
Distribution of Perfluorinated Compounds in Water Environment of The Eastern Coast of South Korea
Abstract
The ubiquitous presence of anthropogenic perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) in the environment has been recognized as an important global environmental issue. In particular, PFCs has been characterized as having either a potential or confirmed adverse impact on both human health, i.e., cancer risks, and the environment, i.e., bioaccumulation and/or biomagnifications within wildlife. For these reasons, PFCs were listed as a persistent organic pollutant in Annex B of the Stockholm Convention in 2009. First above all, due to these mobilities, PFCs are widely dispersed in the environment. As a result, these monitoring has become an important point.
The objective of the present work is to monitor the concentration distribution of 10 PFCs in the eastern coast of South Korea, which is part of an ongoing program of investigation on the local distribution of PFCs. Thus, these data are very important for assessing the fate of PFCs in water environment.
In this study, isotopically labeled internal standards of 13C4-PFOA and 13C4-PFOS were purchased from Wellington Laboratories (Guelph, ON, Cananda). Other chemicals used in this study were ACS grade reagents and were obtained from Junsei (Japan) and J.T. Baker (USA). All samples were extracted using solid-phase extraction (SPE) disk cartridges (Waters Oasis HLB, Waters Co., Milford, MA), and were analyzed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC/ESI-MS/MS) (ACQUIT TQ detector, Waters, USA).
Among PFCs, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) were mainly detected with the highest concentrations, in which the concentrations of these two PFCs were in the range of 13.79 to 44.58 ng/L (mean, 27.95 ng/L) and 9.6 to 50.7 ng/L (mean, 26.14 ng/L), respectively. Furthermore, the concentration of perfluorohexane sulfonate (PFHxS) was in a range of < LOQ to 36.2 ng/L (mean, 4.25 ng/L). The mean concentration of perfluorobutane sulfonate (PFBS) was 2.16 ng/L. With the exception of PFOS, PFOA, PFBS and PFHxS, the remaining other PFCs, such as perfluorohexanoic acid (PFHxA), perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), perfluorodecanoic acid(PFDA), perfluoroundecanoic acid (PFUnDA), perfluorododecanoic acid(PFDoDA), and perfluorodecane sulfonate(PFDS), were less than LOQ. Overall, the concentrations of PFOS, PFOA, PFBS and PFHxS were relatively higher than those of other PFCs. These results show that further monitoring of PFCs is needed. At the same time, their potential risks to both human beings and wildlife are also needed to be deeply investigated.
Keywords: Monitoring, Perfluorinated compounds, PFOA, PFOS