Environmental Science & Technology Letters

Hundreds of sites across the United States have high concentrations of perfluoroalkyl sulfonamides (FASA), but little is known about their propensity to accumulate in fish. FASA are precursors to terminal per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that are abundant in diverse consumer products and aqueous film-forming foams manufactured using electrochemical fluorination (ECF AFFF). In this study, FASA with C3-C8 carbon chain lengths were detected in all fish samples from surface waters up to 8 km downstream of source zones with ECF AFFF contamination...

Per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) are a family of pollutants of high concern due to their ubiquity and negative human health impacts. The long-range marine transport of PFAS was observed during year-long deployments of passive tube samplers in the Fram Strait across three depth transects. Time weighted average concentrations ranged from 2.4-360 pg L-1 , and 10 different PFAS were regularly observed. PFAS profiles and concentrations were generally similar to those previously characterized for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) at these sites...

Historical policies have been shown to underpin environmental quality. In the 1930s, the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed the most comprehensive archive of neighborhoods that would have been redlined by local lenders and the Federal Housing Administration, often applying racist criteria. Our study explored how redlining is associated with environmental quality across eight California cities. We integrated HOLC's graded maps [grades A (i.e., "best" and "greenlined"), B, C, and D (i.e., "hazardous" and "redlined")] with 10 environmental hazards using data from 2018 to 2021 to quantify the spatial overlap among redlined neighborhoods and environmental hazards...

Emissions from volatile chemical products (VCPs) have been identified as contributors to air quality degradation in urban areas. Limonene can be a tracer compound for VCPs containing fragrances in densely populated regions, but limonene is also emitted from conifers that are planted in urban areas. This creates challenges for using limonene to estimate VCP emissions. In this study, the -/+ enantiomeric ratios of limonene from VCP and conifer emission sources were quantified to evaluate if this measurement could be used to aid in source apportionment and emission inventory development...

Avian influenza viruses (AIVs) infect both wild birds and domestic poultry, resulting in economically costly outbreaks that have the potential to impact public health. Currently, a knowledge gap exists regarding the detection of infectious AIVs in the aquatic environment. In response to the 2021-2022 Eurasian strain highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A/goose/Guangdong/1/1996 clade 2.3.4.4 lineage H5 outbreak, an AIV environmental outbreak response study was conducted using a One Health approach. An optimized method was used to temporally sample (April and May 2022) and analyze (culture and molecular methods) surface water from five water bodies (four wetlands and one lake used as a comparison location) in areas near confirmed HPAI detections in wild bird or poultry operations...

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2 ) is a regulated pollutant that is associated with numerous health impacts. Recent advances in epidemiology indicate high confidence linking NO2 exposure with increased mortality, an association that recent studies suggest persists even at concentrations below regulatory thresholds. While large disparities in NO2 exposure among population subgroups have been reported, U.S. NO2 -attributable mortality rates and their disparities remain unquantified. Here we provide the first estimate of NO2 -attributable all-cause mortality across the contiguous U...

A facile and effective strategy that can be used to fabricate electrically conductive membranes (ECMs) of diverse filtration performance (i.e., water productivity and solute rejection) is not available yet. Herein, we report a facile method that enables the fabrication of ECMs of a broad performance range. The method is based on the use of polyethylenimine (PEI), glutaraldehyde, and any of a diverse set of conductive materials to cast an electrically conductive layer atop any of a diverse set of substrates (i...

Pollutant emissions from gas flares in the upstream oil and gas (UOG) industry can be exacerbated by aerosols of coproduced liquid hydrocarbons and formation water that survive separation and enter the flare. Of noteworthy concern is the potential impact of salt-laden aerosols, since the associated chlorine may adversely affect combustion and emissions. Here, we use a novel approach to remotely detect carry-over of salt-laden aerosols into field-operational flares via flame emission spectroscopy targeting two of the most abundant species in produced water samples, sodium and potassium...

Many per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) pose significant health hazards due to their bioactive and persistent bioaccumulative properties. However, assessing the bioactivities of PFASs is both time-consuming and costly due to the sheer number and expense of in vivo and in vitro biological experiments. To this end, we harnessed new unsupervised/semi-supervised machine learning models to automatically predict bioactivities of PFASs in various human biological targets, including enzymes, genes, proteins, and cell lines...

Mercury concentrations and yields in the Yukon River are the highest of the world's six largest panarctic drainages. Permafrost thaw has been implicated as the main driver of these high values. Alternative sources include mercury released from glacial melt and erosion, atmospheric mercury pollution, or surface mining. To determine the summer source and speciation of mercury across the Yukon River basin within Canada, we sampled water from 12 tributaries and the mainstem during July 2021. The total (unfiltered) mercury concentration in the glacier-fed White River was 57 ng/L, >10 times higher than all other sampled tributaries...

The assessment of environmental hazard indicators such as persistence, mobility, toxicity, or bioaccumulation of chemicals often results in highly variable experimental outcomes. Persistence is particularly affected due to a multitude of influencing environmental factors, with biodegradation experiments resulting in half-lives spanning several orders of magnitude. Also, half-lives may lie beyond the limits of reliable half-life quantification, and the number of available data points per substance may vary considerably, requiring a statistically robust approach for the characterization of data...

Schools may have important impacts on children's exposure to ambient air pollution, yet ambient air quality at schools is not consistently tracked. We characterize ambient air quality at home and school locations in the United States using satellite-based empirical model (i.e., land use regression) estimates of outdoor annual nitrogen dioxide (NO2 ). We report disparities by race-ethnicity and impoverishment status, and investigate differences by level of urbanicity. Average NO2 levels at home and school for racial-ethnic minoritized students are 18-22% higher than average (and 37-39% higher than for non-Hispanic, white students)...

The transfer of aquatic contaminants, including mercury (Hg), to terrestrial food webs is an often-overlooked exposure pathway to terrestrial animals. While research has implemented the use of shoreline spiders to assess aquatic to terrestrial Hg transfer, it is unclear whether Hg sources, estimated from isotope ratios, can be successfully resolved to inform site assessments and remedy effectiveness. To examine aquatic to terrestrial Hg transfer, we collected shoreline spiders ( Tetragnatha spp.) and aquatic insect larvae (suborder Anisoptera) across a mosaic of aquatic and shoreline habitats in the St...

Transformation product (TP) information is essential to accurately evaluate the hazards compounds pose to human health and the environment. However, information about TPs is often limited, and existing data is often not fully Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). FAIRifying existing TP knowledge is a relatively easy path toward improving access to data for identification workflows and for machine-learning-based algorithms. ShinyTPs was developed to curate existing transformation information derived from text-mined data within the PubChem database...

A 1937 street map of Durham, North Carolina, located four city-run waste incinerators that we recognized to be sites of contemporary city parks. We obtained city permission to sample three park's soils, developed a sampling design for geospatial mapping of hypothetical incinerator-ash contamination of park soils, and queried online Durham newspapers to understand histories of incinerator operations, ash disposal, and incinerator-to-park conversions. In 2021-2022, seven decades after parks were created, two parks had soil-Pb > 400 mgPb/kg, EPA's threshold for safe soil in play areas...

Fluoroalkylether substances (ether PFAS) constitute a large group of emerging PFAS with uncertain environmental fate. Among them, GenX is the well-known alternative to perfluorooctanoic acid and one of the six proposed PFAS to be regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This study investigated the structure-biodegradability relationship for 12 different ether PFAS with a carboxylic acid headgroup in activated sludge communities. Only polyfluorinated ethers with at least one -CH2 - moiety adjacent to or a C=C bond in the proximity of the ether bond underwent active biotransformation via oxidative and hydrolytic O-dealkylation...

To reconcile the federal regulation of material polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) concentrations with recently implemented state regulations of airborne PCBs, there is a need to characterize the relationship between PCB emissions from surfaces and air concentrations. We hypothesized that the magnitude and congener distribution of emissions from floors and walls fully account for the airborne PCBs measured in rooms constructed during the height of PCB production and sales. We measured emissions of PCB congeners from various wall and floor materials using polyurethane foam passive emission samplers before and after hexane wiping...

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDD), "novel" brominated flame retardants (NBFRs), organophosphate esters (OPEs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were measured in a composite sample of dust from the International Space Station (ISS). Notwithstanding the unique environment from which the dust originated, while concentrations of all target compound classes frequently exceeded the median values in terrestrial indoor microenvironments in the US and western Europe, ISS dust concentrations were generally within the terrestrial range...

On February 3, 2023, a train carrying numerous hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, OH, spurring temporary evacuation of residents and a controlled burn of some of the hazardous cargo. Residents reported health symptoms, including headaches and respiratory, skin, and eye irritation. Initial data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stationary air monitors indicated levels of potential concern for air toxics based on hazard quotient calculations. To provide complementary data, we conducted mobile air quality sampling on February 20 and 21 using proton transfer reaction-mass spectrometry...

Nonsenescent and senescent leaves of selected coniferous and broadleaf plants contained substantial levels of naturally occurring persistent free radicals (PFRs). These biogenic PFRs (BPFRs) were stable and persistent despite multiple wetting and drying cycles, implying that BPFRs can leach and sorb on soil particles. Results suggest that endogenous chemicals in plants and their transformation byproducts can stabilize unpaired electrons in leaves under ambient conditions. Thus, the vast amount and perpetual supply of leaf litter is an unaccounted natural source of BPFRs...