Occurrence of hydrophobic organic pollutants (BFRs and UV-filters) in sediments from South America

In the present study the occurrence of emerging hydrophobic organic pollutants in sediment samples from South America (Chile and Colombia) was investigated for the first time. Nineteen Chilean and thirteen Colombian sediment samples were analyzed in order to determine their content of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) (including PBDEs and emerging BFRs) as well as UV filters (UV-F). Samples were collected from neighboring aquatic ecosystems highly urbanized and industrialized in Colombia (Magdalena River area) and Chile (Biobio region). Different analytical procedures were applied depending on the selected analytes, based on chromatographic and mass spectrometric methodologies (GC-MS and LC-MS-MS). In general, concentration levels of both BFRs (up to 2.43 and 143ng g-1 dw of PBDEs in Chile and Colombia, respectively) and UV-F (nd-2.96 and nd-54.4ng g-1 dw in Chile and Colombia, respectively) were in the low range of published data, and the contribution of BFRs was higher than that of UV-F for almost all the sampled sediments. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.This research project was founded by the Fundación BBVA under the BROMACUA project, and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the projects CEMAGUA (CGL2007-64551/HID) and SCARCE (Consolider Ingenio 2010 CSD2009-00065). This work was partly supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Consolidated Research Group: Water and Soil Quality Unit 2009-SGR-965). The authors would like to thank Dr. Göran Marsh (Department of Environmental Chemistry, Stockholm University, Sweden) for MonoBBPA, DiBBPA, and TriBBPA standards. Waters Corporation (USA) and Isolute (Sweden) are gratefully acknowledged for providing the solid-phase extraction cartridges. The authors want also to express their gratitude to Biotage and Merck for the gift of SPE cartridges and UPLC columns, respectively.Peer Reviewe