BalticSed: Towards a non-toxic Baltic Sea - virtual effect-directed analysis and a non-destructive decontamination method

Nowadays chemicals are everywhere and serious concern about adverse effects on aquatic organisms have been raised, posing an environmental, economic, and health risk.

Millions of chemicals are commercially available, but only a minuscule fraction is internationally regulated and monitored. It is therefore hardly surprising that this limited number of compounds cannot explain observed toxic effects.

In order to protect aquatic environments and human health, the identification of toxic compounds is of great importance.

Sediments are known to be a major sink for a myriad of organic chemicals, and also represent a significant risk for benthic organisms and coastal ecosystems.

Management of such contaminated sediments includes reducing emissions, monitoring, classifying polluted sediments by risk for humans and ecosystems, as well as in situ remediation measures for polluted sediments.We will focus, on biological testing and identification of toxicants, on the development of virtual methods to identify toxicants in new samples.

We will test a non-destructive remediation method in lab scale, which has been used successfully on polychlorinated biphenyls. Finally, we will deploy it in the field in order to decontaminate sediments from toxic chemicals.