Abstract
The use of reclaimed water in agriculture is an effective way to alleviate water scarcity. However, reclaimed water often contains pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs), which might be introduced into agricultural soil and crops through reclaimed water irrigation. In this study, a field experiment was conducted to investigate the concentrations of PPCPs in the soil-cereal system after reclaimed water irrigation in 2015 and 2016 in the North China Plain. Three different water qualities were used for summer maize and winter wheat: reclaimed water, mixed water (reclaimed water and groundwater, 1:1), and groundwater. The total concentration of 11 PPCPs in winter wheat grain, summer maize grain and the topsoil (0–20 cm depth) was 1.37–7.65, 4.33–5.07, and 5.85–13.7 μg/kg, respectively. And the total bioaccumulation factors (BCFs) of the 11 PPCPs for summer maize and winter wheat were 3.40–5.23 and 0.11–0.21, respectively. There were no significant differences in the PPCP concentrations in the topsoil-cereal system or in the BCFs among the three irrigation treatments. The total hazard quotients for the 11 PPCPs were 0.019 and 0.053 for adults and toddlers, respectively, suggesting that consumption of the cereal grains in the current research (irrigation with groundwater, mixed water, or reclaimed water) presented little risk to human health.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available upon request from the corresponding author.
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Acknowledgements
People in the Beijing Irrigation Test Center Station have given us a lot of help during the experimental time, we are very grateful to them for their help.
Funding
This research was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (BK20200941; BK20200955), the Green Yang Jinfeng project (YZLYJF2020PHD070), construction of safe utilization technology system of reclaimed water in Beijing, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (52009117).
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The experiments were designed by HL, the experiments were performed by HF and BL, the data was analyzed by WX, the paper was written by YL and JW.
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Li, Y., Liu, H., Wang, J. et al. Impacts of reclaimed water irrigation on the accumulation of pharmaceutical and personal care products in soil and cereals. Irrig Sci 42, 419–430 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00271-023-00868-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00271-023-00868-5