Department Environmental Chemistry

Chemicals are released to the environment through a variety of pathways. While some can be quickly degraded in the environment, many are persistent, mobile and toxic (PMT), resulting in deleterious effects on humans and environmental ecosystems. The “Safe and Sustainable by Design” (SSbD) framework of the European Commission promotes taking environmental risk into account early in the design process for new chemicals. However, currently available tests are not able to do this, as they are slow and cumbersome, and can only be applied to single chemicals at a time, not to dozens of prospective compounds in a chemical development context.

The overall objective of the project is to develop a high-throughput and automated laboratory and data analysis workflow to better assess chemical environmental persistence in a systematic and efficient way. Some aspects of the project are as follows:

• Optimize a miniaturized biodegradation experiment in a well plate format
• Optimize an efficient LC-HRMS method to analyze samples for the determination of primary biodegradation kinetics
• Explore opportunities to reduce analytical effort on the data analysis side
• Translate the miniaturized workflow to an automated liquid handling platform
• Apply the automated workflow to a variety of case studies including anti-oxidant compounds, green solvents, and a pesticide library of ~300 compounds
• Link the persistence workflow to eco-toxicity testing as a proof-of-concept for the recently proposed CTE/PTE concept (Escher et al., 2023)

The final workflow will both allow chemical industry to test for chemical environmental persistence on whole suites of test chemicals earlier on in their development pipelines, and allow researchers to generate large amounts of degradation data that can be used in predictive modeling efforts. The workflow will be a crucial tool in the SSbD toolbox, and will help to enable a balance between beneficial chemical use and the protection of human health and the environment.