Complex organic pollutant mixtures originating from industrial and municipal emissions in surface waters of the megacity Jakarta—an example of a water pollution problem in emerging economies

Abstract

During the last decades, the global industrial production partly shifted from industrialized nations to emerging and developing countries. In these upcoming economies, the newly developed industrial centers are generally located in densely populated areas, resulting in the discharge of often only partially treated industrial and municipal wastewaters into the surface waters. There is a huge gap of knowledge about the composition of the complex organic pollutant mixtures occurring in such heavily impacted areas. Therefore, we applied a non-target screening to comprehensively assess river pollution in a large industrial area located in the megacity Jakarta. More than 100 structurally diverse organic contaminants were identified, some of which were reported here for the first time as environmental contaminants. The concentrations of paper manufacturing chemicals in river water—for example, of the endocrine-disrupting compound bisphenol A (50–8000 ng L⁻¹)—were as high as in pure untreated paper industry wastewaters. The non-target screening approach is the adequate tool for the identification of water contaminants in the new global centers of industrial manufacturing—as the first crucial step towards the evaluation of as yet unrecognized environmental risks.

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