DETERMINATION OF BISPHENOL A IN A POTABLE WATER PRODUCING PLANT

Due to increased potable water consumption, continuing to pump up ever larger amounts of ground water is hardly an option in the future. An interesting option is to reuse the effluent of a waste water treatment plant (WWTP). The major advantage of this approach is that over a year, the supply of waste water and demand of potable water are more or less in equilibrium. With ground water supply, this is usually not the case. Moreover, nowadays the quality of wastewater treatment is such that the effluent can be reused (Van Houtte & Verbauwhede, 2006). A possible problem however, are endocrine disruptors. These molecules are often difficult to degrade in a WWT plant, and one cannot exclude that they pass through an RO system as well, and thus concentrate into the water cycle. We selected bisphenol A (BPA) as a model compound and followed its concentration throughout the water cycle at the Torreele site in Western Flandres. Because BPA is fluorescencent it can be analyzed sensitively and highly selective.status: publishe