Many pesticides applied in cut flowers can be readily absorbed through the skin of florists during preparing bouquets and handling contaminated flowers. A study was conducted among volunteer Belgian florists in order to assess their total exposure by measuring concentrations of pesticides (parent compounds and metabolites) in their urines. A total of 42 urine samples (24-h urines) were collected from florists during their professional activities, on the three most important commercial periods. The concentrations of pesticide residues and metabolites in urine samples were analyzed with a multiresidue liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry method, after an ethyl acetate extraction. The results are compared with those of a control group of 42 subjects not occupationally exposed to pesticides, collected in the same periods. A total of 70 residues (56 pesticides and 14 metabolites) were identified, with an average of about eight pesticide residues and metabolites per florist's urine sample and an average total concentration per sample of 4.3 mu g/g creatinine, ranging from 0.2 to 67 mu g/g creatinine. Significantly higher urinary excretion of metabolites (t-test) was found in florists than in control group. These results demonstrate that Belgian florists are exposed daily to pesticide residues with a potential effect on their health.
A large variety of organic chemicals – including pharmaceuticals, personal care products and pesticides – are used in everyday life across the globe. Many of these chemicals are discharged into the sewer system, either in their unchanged form or as metabolites, and will eventually enter wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). Yet, WWTP are not designed and most often not able to completely remove these so-called micropollutants (Vergeynst et al., 2015). As result of WWTP effluent discharge, incorrect usage, improper disposal and industrial processes, these trace organic compounds are emerging in our aquatic environment. As many of the chemicals are known to have biological effects, they are of great environmental concern and their occurrence should be closely monitored. Presently, knowledge about the prevalence and behaviour of these compounds is well documented for wastewater, riverine water, groundwater and drinking water (Stuart et al., 2012; Caldas et al., 2013; Batt et al., 2017). Marine waters, on the contrary, have received much less attention so-far regarding the occurrence, fate and effects of emerging organic micropollutants. Main reasons can be found in, a.o., the analytical challenges with respect to sampling and their prevalence at ultra-trace (≤ppb-levels) concentrations. Suitable sample preparation techniques are thus of paramount importance to be able to deal with these low concentrations prevailing in the marine environment. Next to that, highly sensitive and selective instrumental analytic techniques are needed. In this context, modern high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) enables the quantification of known micropollutants at environmental concentrations and the screening for a virtually unlimited number of unknown micropollutants in a single run. Therefore, this study focussed on the comparison of two solid-phase extraction (SPE) techniques followed by a newly developed and validated UHPLC-Q-Orbitrap-HRMS method for targeted screening of the marine environment towards a large set of multi-class pharmaceuticals, personal care products and pesticides. Next, untargeted screening followed by multi-variate analysis was performed as a proof of concept and to enable the discrimination between the two SPE-methods.
The development of farm-scale anaerobic digesters is recently gaining more interest due to its ecological and financial benefits. Such installations allow the conversion of proprietary biomass to biogas and digestate and thus contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by avoiding uncontrolled emissions during long-term biomass storage (Marañón et al., 2011; MesaDominguez et al., 2015; Miranda et al., 2015). The produced biogas, usually burnt in a combined heat and power (CHP) unit, will provide electricity and heat for farmers to become (partly) self-sufficient in their energy demand. However, most of the current farm-scale installations only use cattle slurry as input. Other agricultural sectors can still not benefit from the (partial) fulfillment of the energy requirements this technology can offer while rising energy prices become a more and more determining cost. Within the context of the Pocket Power project a sector scan for agricultural subsectors is ongoing for the region of Flanders, Belgium. This sector scan explores the possible transfer of the positive experiences with small-scale anaerobic digestion of cattle slurry to other agricultural streams (e.g. pig manure, crop residues). By means of data from the BIOSURF project, funded by the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program of the European Union, the results obtained for Flanders will be extrapolated to an overall potential for Europe. The BIOSURF project itself aims to describe opportunities and potential environmental burdens associated with biomethane production and consumption (Kirchmeyr, 2016).
Q. XU, S. HATT, T. LOPES, J. CHEN & F. FRANCIS 1 State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests, Institute of Plant Protection, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 2 West Yuan-ming-yuan Road, Beijing 100193, P.R. China. 2 Functional and Evolutionary Entomology, Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, University of Liège Passage des Déportés 2, BE-5030 Gembloux, Belgium. 3 TERRA AgricultureIsLife, Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, University of Liege Passage des Déportés 2, BE-5030 Gembloux, Belgium.
