posted on 2019-05-31, 00:00authored byAna B. Martínez-Piernas, Patricia Plaza-Bolaños, Pilar Fernández-Ibáñez, Ana Agüera
In many regions,
reuse of reclaimed water (RW) is a necessity for
irrigation. The presence of organic microcontaminants (OMCs) in RW
and their translocation to plants may represent a risk of human exposure.
Nevertheless, information available about real field crops is scarce
and focused on a limited number of compounds. The novelty of this
work relies on the application of a wider-scope analytical approach
based on a multianalyte target analysis (60 compounds) and a suspect
screening (>1300 compounds). This methodology was applied to real
field-grown tomato crops irrigated with RW. The study revealed the
presence of 17 OMCs in leaves (0.04–32 ng g–1) and 8 in fruits (0.01–1.1 ng g–1), 5 of
them not reported before in real field samples. A health-risk assessment,
based on the toxicological threshold concern (TTC) concept, showed
that RW irrigation applied under the conditions given does not pose
any threat to humans.