MonitoringBase Surfactants overview and users manual

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 inventorise 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 demon-strating 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:

• To develop a database (MonitoringBase Surfactants) to store measured environ-mental concentration data of surfactants.
• To retrieve environmental data of anionic, non-ionic, cationic and amphoteric surfactants in the European environment (water, sediment, agricultural soil, bio-ta, waste water and sludge) for the period 1970 to 2005, and to evaluate, score and load the data in MonitoringBase Surfactants.