Wednesday Morning Session Preview: Emerging Environmental Contaminants

Wednesday, 8:30 - 10:30 AM, Room 101

This session will cover a broad range of emerging environmental contaminants including organic components from fire retardant applied during a wildfire, disinfectant byproducts in swimming pools, pharmaceuticals in wastewater samples, and more.

The first talk in this session is titled “Organic components in a wildfire-applied fire retardant by positive and negative electrospray ionization high resolution mass spectrometry” and will be given by Colleen Rostad of USGS, WRD, National Research Program. Rostad will discuss the primary organic component of a widely used wildfire retardant, which was identified as 5-methyl-1H-benzotriazole, a corrosion inhibitor.

The next talk will be given by Xing-Fang Li of the University of Alberta and is titled “Mass Spectrometry Characterization and Determination of Emerging Disinfection Byproducts in Swimming Pools.” Li will discuss the new results of high resolution mass spectrometry characterization and SPE-LC¬–MS-MS determination of emerging halobenzoquinones (HBQs) in swimming pools.

Following Li will be Karl J. Jobst of the Ontario Ministry of the Environment with a presentation titled “Integrating comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography, (ultra)high resolution mass spectrometry and mass defect analysis for the identification of halogenated environmental contaminants.” Jobst will discuss the identification of (novel) environmental contaminants using GCxGC-HRMS and mass defect plots.

Next, Heinz Singer of Eawag - Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science will present “Exact mass screening of 1024 pharmaceuticals in wastewater samples using QExactive mass spectrometer,” which will focus on the novel aspect of fast screening for 1024 pharmaceuticals in wastewater matrix with only chemical structures using high resolution mass spectrometry.

Mckay Allred of Oregon State University will discuss fluorinated chemicals that are quantified by large volume (900 μL) injection of an organic solvent extract onto an orthogonal HPLC-MS-MS system in the talk titled “Large Volume Injection of 900 μL Landfill Leachate Extracts for Fluorochemicals Analysis by Orthogonal Diol/C18 HPLC-MS/MS.”

Last, but not least, Christian Zwiener of the University of Tuebingen will present “Are the results of non-target screening for water contaminants very surprising?” This talk will be about non-target screening of emerging pollutants combined with statistical data evaluation and in-silico mass fragmentation.