Abstract
The fundamental goal of water quality engineering is to ensure water safety to humans and the environment. Traditional water quality engineering consists of monitoring, evaluation, and control of key water quality parameters. This approach provides some vital insights into water quality, however, most of these parameters do not account for pollutant mixtures - a reality that terminal water users face, nor do most of these parameters have a direct connection with the human health safety of waters. This puts the real health-specific effects of targeted water pollutant monitoring and engineering control in question. To focus our attention to one of the original goals of water quality engineering - human health and environmental protection, we advocate here the toxicity-oriented water quality monitoring and control. This article presents some of our efforts towards such goal. Specifically, complementary to traditional water quality parameters, we evaluated the water toxicity using high sensitivity toxicological endpoints, and subsequently investigated the performance of some of the water treatment strategies in modulating the water toxicity. Moreover, we implemented the toxicity concept into existing water treatment design theory to facilitate toxicity-oriented water quality control designs. Suggestions for the next steps are also discussed. We hope our work will intrigue water quality scientists and engineers to improve and embrace the mixture water pollutant and toxicological evaluation and engineering control.
Highlights
Water quality engineering has come a long way since the mid-19th century
Traditional water quality engineering consists of monitoring, evaluation, and control of key water pollution parameters (Crittenden et al, 2012; Metcalf & Eddy Inc., 2013)
The toxicitybased approach was only used for the evaluation of individual disinfection byproducts (DBPs) chemicals, and the overall effect of DBP mixtures are mostly predicted based on a linear addition model (Yeatts et al, 2010)
Summary
Water quality engineering has come a long way since the mid-19th century. Researchers study water quality to monitor, but to impose necessary engineering controls to maintain or improve water quality, with the fundamental. Long realizing the limitations of individualized parameter monitoring and control, researchers proposed and developed the combined parameters that has been proven to be effective and efficient in many scenarios, e.g. total organic carbon These parameters are not directly indicative of water safety – an important part of the original intention to investigate water quality. The toxicitybased approach was only used for the evaluation of individual DBP chemicals, and the overall effect of DBP mixtures are mostly predicted based on a linear addition model (Yeatts et al, 2010) This brings the question back to the original conundrum about the real human health protection effects of targeted individual pollutants control. The toxicity-oriented water quality monitoring and control is hoped to collectively consider a broader range of contaminants’ negative health impacts simultaneously compared to the traditional approach (Li and Mitch, 2018), and reveals a different set of biological impacts that the traditional approach may have missed
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