Chapter 5 - Aggregate organic constituents

Abstract

As water and wastewater are composed of the mixture of numerous mineral and organic constituents under dissolved, colloidal, or suspended solid forms, the measurement of aggregate parameters is always more adapted than specific analysis for the global pollution assessment of water or wastewater. In this context, BOD5, chemical oxygen demand, dissolved organic carbon, or total organic carbon are important aggregate parameters linked to the presence of organic compounds in water. Besides these parameters, the characterization of dissolved organic matter in water bodies gives information about the nature and fate of organic compounds’ mixture in water. In this context, UV spectrophotometry (with spectra exploitation and specific UV absorbance calculation) can be seen as a key technique; the number of works published in these last 5 years (2015–20) on the topic is almost the same (13,000) that of works between 2000 and 2014 (15,000), demonstrating the growing interest for this simple approach.