EcoImpact is an Eawag-wide interdisciplinary research effort, strongly motivated by the planned modifications of the Swiss wastewater treatment plants.
Comprehensive monitoring of organic trace substances in surface waters is time-consuming and costly. The NAWA SPEZ project delivers data and analyses on the status of water pollution.
...is an inter- and trans-disciplinary research project, studying environmental, health and institutional dimensions of pesticide use in tropical settings
According the Swiss constitution, the Swiss agriculture has to fulfill several, partially conflicting goals such as agricultural production on the one hand and
The river Rhine and its tributaries are a source of drinking water for more than 20 million people. At the same time treated waste water from numerous industrial sites and from the 54 million people living in the catchment area ends up in the rivers...
Various aquatic organisms produce extracellular biomolecules, e.g., enzymes to catalyze reactions, chelators to transport metals, or toxins to fight competitors...
N-nitrosamines such as N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) are of public and regulatory concern because these potent carcinogens can be formed as unintented by-products during drinking and waste water disinfection/oxidation.
Nitroaromatic explosives persist in the subsurface in different phases (e.g., bound to soil or sediment matrix or as solid-phase residues) and it is extremely challenging to assess biotic and mineral-catalyzed degradation. With the combined analysis of C, N, and H isotope fractionation, we can quantify transformation, even if it takes place via several potentially competing pathways over time-scales of decades.
The extension of the CSIA approach to micropollutants is challenging for both analytical and conceptual reasons. In a collaborative SNF-Sinergia project, we aim at elucidating the fate of pesticides by multi-element isotope analysis on the field scale.
Our research on fate of pharmaceuticals is motivated by investigating transformation pathways and kinetics to better understand the lifetime of such biologically active compounds in our freshwater Systems...
A contemporary view of rivers recognizes them as having multiple vertical and lateral flow paths serving as bidirectional links to the surrounding landscape...
The screening of aquatic systems for known and unknown polar and semi-polar organic micropollutants relies heavily on analytical chemistry, foremost high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) coupled to liquid chromatography (LC)....