MonitoringBase Surfactants. Overview and Users’ manual Version 1.0

Introduction

Over the last 20 – 30 years, a considerable amount of resources have been spent by the detergent industries (AISE/CESIO), as well as governments and other parties, on the monitoring of surfactant concentrations in various environmental matrices. Recently, the development by CEFIC-LRI of a user-friendly database ((Leslie et al., 2004; MonitoringBase, 2004).) to store metadata and actual measurements of chemicals in the environment has provided a cost-effective opportunity for ERASM to inventories and centralise field measurements of surfactants. This will now enable ERASM to create a legacy of its work for future product defence as well as demonstrating leadership of the detergent industry in providing information to external stakeholders. A system is required for appraising the quality of data arising from surfactant monitoring studies for inputting into this database. MonitoringBase, however, contained only a limited number of data on a selected set of surfactants. The objective of the current study was therefore:

1. To develop a database (MonitoringBase Surfactants) to store measured environmental concentration data of surfactants.
2. To retrieve environmental data of anionic, non-ionic, cationic and amphoteric surfactants in the European environment (water, sediment, agricultural soil, biota, waste water and sludge) for the period 1970 to 2005, and to evaluate, score and load the data in MonitoringBase Surfactants. In the next chapters an overview of the database is given including a manual how to us the database.