A New Paradigm for Environmental Monitoring to Fully Protect the Next Generation

Keynote Speaker
Oral Presentation

Prepared by D. Schiessel
BABCOCK Laboratories, Inc., 6100 Quail Valley Court, Riverside, CA, 92507, United States


Contact Information: [email protected]; 951-289-5278

ABSTRACT

Since the inception of the USEPA in 1970 environmental analysis has been mostly performed as a reactive response to various environmental discoveries and subsequent regulatory action. That framework was designed in part to prioritize immediate public health issues, site contamination, or target toxic contaminant classes (PCBs, Dioxins, PFAS, etc). Although this targeted analysis strategy has been somewhat effective in protecting human health for over half a century, a more proactive model is needed to minimize the inherent gaps in this framework and to fully protect human health. Technologies and workflows have developed rapidly in recent years which allow us to detect thousands of chemicals across many samples approaching the scale that we currently do targeted analysis. Such a new vision would not be a replacement strategy but rather a complimentary one where the public trust is increased by proactive analyses that look beyond the regulated world. The primary goal of non-targeted analysis is to fill this inherent knowledge gap through chemical discovery. While this work has been typically done in the academic community, academia alone cannot fill this knowledge gap. This need has already required commercial laboratories to perform this analysis, but a unified approach is warranted.

After performing generalized Non-Targeted Analysis on hundreds of samples successfully, there are some lessons learned that can be incorporated into this new proactive strategy. Stakeholders should no longer be limited by targeted analysis, which tends to propagate more “emerging contaminants”, but should embrace a broader vision of what it means to protect human health through non-targeted analysis. This vision is a call to stakeholders to develop NTA standards that can unify data quality, qualification, and quantitation. This proactive vison provides a better position for stakeholders to prepare and adapt to regulation once promulgated because all regulated contaminants were “emergent” at some point historically. Still, NTA will not be the endpoint and will need to be coupled with computational approaches to toxicity to scale the full scope of prudent monitoring. And this vision can only be accomplished by collaborating with technical working groups such as Best Practices for Non-targeted Analysis (BP4NTA).