Towards harmonization of water quality management: A comparison of chemical drinking water and surface water quality standards around the globe.

Water quality standards (WQS) set the legal definition for safe and desirable water. WQS impose regulatory concentration limits to act as a jurisdiction-specific legislative risk-management tool. Despite its importance in shaping a universal definition of safe, clean water, little information exists with respect to (dis)similarity of chemical WQS worldwide.

Bottle or tap? Toward an integrated approach to water type consumption.

While in many countries, people have access to cheap and safe potable tap water, the global consumption of bottled water is rising. Flanders, Belgium, where this study is located, has an exceptionally high consumption of bottled water per capita. However, in the interest of resource efficiency and global environmental challenges, the consumption of tap water is preferable.

Leaf-deposited semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs): An exploratory study using GCxGC-TOFMS on leaf washing solutions.

Airborne particulate matter (PM) includes semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs), which can be deposited on vegetation matrices such as plant leaves. In alternative to air-point measurements or artificial passive substrates, leaf monitoring offers a cost-effective, time-integrating means of assessing local air quality. In this study, leaf washing solutions from ivy (Hedera hibernica) leaves exposed during one-month at different land use classes were explored via comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GCxGC-TOFMS).

Suspect screening and target quantification of multi-class pharmaceuticals in surface water based on large-volume injection liquid chromatography and time-of-flight mass spectrometry.

The ever-growing number of emerging micropollutants such as pharmaceuticals requests rapid and sensitive full-spectrum analytical techniques. Time-of-flight high-resolution mass spectrometry (TOF-HRMS) is a promising alternative for the state-of-the-art tandem mass spectrometry instruments because of its ability to simultaneously screen for a virtually unlimited number of suspect analytes and to perform target quantification. The challenge for such suspect screening is to develop a strategy, which minimizes the false-negative rate without restraining numerous false-positives.

Accurate mass determination, quantification and determination of detection limits in liquid chromatography-high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry: challenges and practical solutions.

Uniform guidelines for the data processing and validation of qualitative and quantitative multi-residue analysis using full-spectrum high-resolution mass spectrometry are scarce. Through systematic research, optimal mass accuracy and sensitivity are obtained after refining the post-processing of the HRMS data. For qualitative analysis, transforming the raw profile spectra to centroid spectra is recommended resulting in a 2.

Elemental and ionic concentrations in the urban aerosol in Antwerp, Belgium.

The results of a study of the elemental and ionic composition of the ambient aerosol in and around Antwerp are presented. Four sampling campaigns were performed, covering all seasons. The samples were obtained by filtration and impaction methods.