Das Projekt "Prioritaets-Tenside und ihre toxischen Metaboliten in Abwasser-Ableitungen: Eine integrierte Studie (PRSITINE)" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von ESWE-Institut für Wasserforschung und Wassertechnologie durchgeführt. The project ist a part of the Waste Water Cluster, which is a focused approach involving three European research projects within the area environmental technologies in the EU Environment & Climate programme. The objective is to improve the understanding of the transformation, fate and toxicity of selected groups of industrial pollutants discharged into the water resources by using complementary sampling and advanced measuring techniques. The expected results should provide better monitoring data for risk assessment of waste water and should in the long run lead to a cleaner, healthier, and sustainable environment for the European citizen. PRISTINE wants to improve the knowledge of pollution by surfactants and decrease the contamination level adopting an ecological compromise between industry and policy makers. Surfactants are surface-active compounds, which are used in industrial processes as well as in trade and households. They have one of the highest production rate of all organic chemicals. Commercial mixtures of surfactants consist of several tens to hundreds of homologues, oligomers and isomers of anionic, nonionic, cationic and amphoteric compounds. Therefore their identification and quantification in the environment is complicated and cumbersome. Detection, identification and quantification of these compounds in aqueous solutions, even in the form of matrix-free standards, still faces the analyst with considerable problems.The project combines researchers in the field of analytical environmental chemistry, toxicology and industry that needs to treat wastewater heavily contaminated with surfactants as well as industry that produces surfactants and that is interested in improving their knowledge on fate and toxicity data on surfactants and metabolites formed. An analytical methodology, that permits to determine the various surfactants and identify new metabolites, will be developed. Multistep sample preparation methods together with advanced techniques like LC-MS (including various types of interfacing systems) will be used for the final identification. Unknown metabolites will be synthesized to unequivocally confirm their presence in the environment. The analytical data of the various surfactants will be correlated with toxicity as eg endocrine disruptor effects. In this respect there is especially a lack of metabolite information, their toxicity and their levels in the aquatic environment. The levels of relevant surfactants will be monitored in biota and the degradation pathway studied in waste water treatment plants and in model studies in order to determine their possible impact on the health of the ecosystem. Different aquatic environments in Europe will be investigated and a common analytical and toxicological protocol for the environmental fate of surfactants and their metabolites in urban and industrial waste water treatment plants achieved.The information obtained by the completion of these objectives will ....