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Nanoparticles in wastewater treatment plants: a novel acute toxicity test for ciliates and its implementation in risk assessment

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Abstract

Nanomaterial (NM) release into wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is inevitable due to increased production and application throughout past decades and in the future. Concern arose about environmental risks and impact on activated sludge. Environmental risk assessment (ERA) for NMs according to established guidelines is considered not suitable, because NMs exhibit unique characteristics. For hazard identification on activated sludge, standard test organisms for aquatic toxicity testing are not meaningful. In this study, we developed an acute toxicity test for ciliates (Paramecium tetraurelia) as representatives of the important functional group of microbial predators and filter feeders. We chose silver nanoparticles (nAg) exemplarily for ion releasing nanoparticles and regarded toxicity by ions as well. Our results indicate that ions are more toxic (EC50 0.73 mg/L) than nanoparticles themselves (EC50 2.15 mg/L). However, nAg must be considered as a source of ions and requires size, surface coating, and compartment-specific ERA. We strived to develop such ERA based on our results, modeled environmental concentration data from literature, and surface area concentrations. Results indicated a probable risk toward activated sludge. This likely has effects on effluent water quality. We conclude that carefully modeled environmental concentrations are vital for more exact ERA for nAg and other NMs.

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Acknowledgment

The authors thank Klaus Tschira Stiftung for financiation; Dr. Eva-Maria Ladenburg (University of Konstanz) for kind donation of axenic cell culture inoculums; Claus Ripl, Dr. André Lerch, and Jana Brückner (TU Dresden, Institute of Water Supply) for providing the Zetasizer; Dr. Thomas Klinger (TU Dresden, Tharandt) for ICP-OES analyses, Dr. Michael Stintz and Petra Fiala (TU Dresden, MVT) for SEM analyses, Dr. Holger Stephan and Katrin Taetz (Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf) for NTA analyses; and Henriette Leps for basic work on test design.

Funding sources

This work was funded by Klaus Tschira Stiftung gGmbH

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology, Technische Universitaet Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Corinna Burkart, Thomas Berendonk & Dirk Jungmann

  2. Central Laboratory for Water Analytics & Chemometrics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, 39114, Magdeburg, Germany

    Wolf von Tümpling

Authors
  1. Corinna Burkart
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  2. Wolf von Tümpling
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  3. Thomas Berendonk
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  4. Dirk Jungmann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Corinna Burkart.

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Responsible editor: Roland Kallenborn

Electronic supplementary material

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ESM 1

The SI section contains figures on experimental setup and on regression analysis of mass concentration and sac with ion release; equations for particle size determination according to UV-vis results; tables on zeta potential and particle size results, and literature data on ECx of NM-300K transformed to sac and ERA values for freshwater. (DOCX 380 kb)

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Burkart, C., von Tümpling, W., Berendonk, T. et al. Nanoparticles in wastewater treatment plants: a novel acute toxicity test for ciliates and its implementation in risk assessment. Environ Sci Pollut Res 22, 7485–7494 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-014-4057-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-014-4057-3

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