TY - JOUR A1 - Nxumalo, T. A1 - Akhdhar, A. A1 - Mueller, V. A1 - Simon, Fabian A1 - von der Au, Marcus A1 - Cossmer, Antje A1 - Pfeifer, Jens A1 - Krupp, E. A1 - Meermann, Björn A1 - Kindness, A. A1 - Feldmann, J. T1 - EOF and target PFAS analysis in surface waters affected by sewage treatment effluents in Berlin, Germany N2 - Per- and polyfuoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are emerging organic pollutants and can occur in surface and groundwater. To identify the degree of pollution in surface water with PFAS, often targeted HPLC–ESI–MS/MS has been employed in which commonly 30–40 compounds are analyzed. However, other PFAS and organofuorines remain undetected. We sampled surface water of the river Spree and the Teltow Canal in Berlin, Germany, which are afected by the efuent discharge of wastewater treatment plants. Here, we employed high-resolution continuum source graphite furnace molecular absorption spectrometry (HR-CS-GFMAS) for measuring extractable organofuorines (EOF) and compared in a mass balance approach the total fuorine to the identifed and quantifed PFAS from the targeted analysis. The analysis highlights that the EOF are in the range expected for an urban river system (Winchell et al. in Sci Total Environ 774, 2021). However, downstream of an efuent discharge, the EOF increased by one order of magnitude, e.g., 40.3 to 574 ng F L−1, along the Teltow Canal. From our target analytes, mostly short-chained perfuorinated carboxylic acids and sulfonates occur in the water, which however makes up less than 10% of the EOF. The increase in EOF in the Teltow Canal correlates well with the increase of perfuorohexanoic acid (PFHxA), indicating that PFHxA is characteristic for the discharged EOF but not responsible for the increase. Hence, it points to PFHxA precursor discharge. The study highlights that EOF screening using HR-CS-GFMAS is necessary to identify the full scale of pollution with regard to PFAS and other organofuorines such as pharmaceutical compounds from the efuent of WWTPs. KW - PFAS KW - WWTP KW - GF-MAS PY - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-580341 VL - 415 SP - 1195 EP - 1204 PB - Springer AN - OPUS4-58034 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -