According to the definition of ecological status (Table 1), Environmental Quality Standards (EQSs) for water, sediments and biota in aquatic systems are needed to assess risk to the health of humans and other living species due to toxicity and ecotoxicity of the major micropollutants. From the point of view of characterisation of sediments, a major role can be ascribed to the development of selective analytical methods including the complete process from sampling to detection.
In the field of installations for handling substances dangerous to water bodies, an important role is also played by the EC Directive on the control of major disasters involving dangerous substances [3], the Construction Products Directive [4] and the standardization procedure under CEN (Comité Européen de Normalisation). The EU countries have common regulations governing the classication and labelling of chemical substances. They also carry out the joint classication and assessment of chemical substances.
The priority pollutants (PP) and the priority hazardous pollutants (PHP) for EU were selected according to the screening procedure common monitoring-based modelling-based priority scheme (COMMPS). The priority substances have been identied in accordance with the Council Directive 76/464/EEC of 4 May 1976 on pollution caused by certain dangerous substances discharged into the aquatic environment of the Community [5] and the Decision 2455/2001/EC [6] of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 November 2001, establishing the list of priority substances in the eld of water policy and amending WFD 2000/60/EC [2].
The actual criteria prescribed by the WFD are embedded in an overall concept of river basin planning which is underpinned by the physical structure of the river catchments areas and therefore extends beyond Member State boundaries. To implement these planning requirements there will thus be a need for closer cooperation between different administrative bodies and different countries.
Hence, the Decision no. 2455/2001/EC [6] ranks in order of priority the substances for which quality standards and emission control measures should be set at the Community level. In Annex X of this Decision the proposal has been made for a complete list of priority substances or groups of substances (including anthracene, benzene, cadmium and its compounds, tributyltin and naphthalene, see Table 2). The COMMPS approach has led to a rst selection of 33 priority pollutants including 11 priority dangerous pollutants. These last micropollutants should be phased-out avoiding any emission, discharge and losses of these molecules within 2020. The Committee for the implementation of WFD will dene through regulations pollutant EQSs and suggest the most advanced analytical methods (from sampling to detection) to be used in monitoring.
The safety factors, which set appropriate safety factors in each case consistent with the nature and quality of the available data and the guidance are given in section 3.3.1 of Part II of the “Technical guidance document in support of Commission Directive 93/67/EEC on risk assessment for new noticed substances and Commission Regulation (EC) No 1488/94 on risk assessment for existing substances” [7]. The procedure reported in Table 3 was used to select the PP and PHP.
The EU Water WFD contains provisions that call for assessment of contaminated sediments. First, article 16(7) of the Directive states that the Commission shall submit proposals for quality standards applicable to the concentrations of the priority substances in surface water, sediments or biota. If quality criteria were to be dened for sediments, then monitoring would be required to establish compliance with such criteria. Secondly, it is clear from the WFD that sediment monitoring can play a role when assessing impacts on environmental quality. In order to address these requirements of the WFD, the Working Group on Analysis and Monitoring of Priority Substances (AMPS) has considered the technical implications of sediment monitoring. AMPS intends to summarise the key issues and give technical expert advice to the European Commission on analysis and monitoring aspects, in order to justify the choices made in the forthcoming proposal for a daughter Directive on priority substances. AMPS proposes the following denition for sediment: particulate material such as sand, silt, clay or organic matter that has been deposited on the bottom of a water body and is susceptible to being transported by water [8]. The purpose of analysing the levels of priority substances in sediments under the WFD are:
a) monitoring the progressive reduction in the contamination of priority substances and phasing out of priority hazardous substances; and
b) demonstrating conditions of “no deterioration” in sediment quality. This is implicit in the need to ensure adequate provision of pollution prevention and control [8].
Four types of monitoring relate to the WFD:
1) risk assessment, for instance by applying the sediment quality Triad [8] for an initial indication of the likely causes of a waterbody’s poor ecological status;
2) trend monitoring, providing an indication of increases or decreases in concentrations of contaminants over time;
3) spatial monitoring, providing an indication of the status of contamination over a given area;
4) compliance monitoring, for checking if pre-set sediment EQS are met.
Furthermore, sediments have an impact on ecological quality because of their quality or quantity, or both. Therefore, sediment monitoring programmes should also address the basic physical-chemical properties of sediments (grain size distribution, organic carbon content etc.) as well as the geomorphological processes within each river system, including those operating in oodplains, wetlands and the coastal zone. The physical-chemical quality of sediments is featured in the denition of good and moderate ecological status in rivers and lakes (Annex V 1.2). However, as this issue is not related to priority substances, it is outside the scope of the discussion document [9].
In Italy, ecotoxicology has found a place with the Legislative Decree no. 152 (May 11, 1999) [10] emanated to adopt the Directives 91/271/CEE “Urban waste-water treatment” and 91/676/CEE “Protection of waters against pollution caused by nitrates from agricultural sources”. This decree in reality goes beyond (actually, the WFD is still in progress) and charges the Regions with the duty to identify, for all water bodies, the class of quality on the basis of chemical and biological monitoring and their classication according to the environmental quality objectives.
In the Italian list of priority substances [11] there are six priority heavy metals. For the sake of classication of any water body according to its overall environmental quality status, the presence of micropollutants at a concentration above or below the EQS established for that substance according to the procedure of Table 3 should be assessed. In fact the environmental status is assumed as the ecological status as dened by the WFD integrated with the chemical status related to the presence of micropollutants. The detection of just one micropollutant at a concentration exceeding the EQS stands for a bad environmental status.
The EQSs ofcially dened are given elsewhere [11]. Their values to protect living organisms (and not only human beings) are quite low, as reported in Table 2 for the priority pollutants identied in Annex X of the WFD. Moreover, Italian legislation set a limited number of EQSs for sediments in salty and marine waters (Tab. 4). The EU approach is taken as a reference also in countries outside the Union. As an example, the policy of the Republic of Armenia [12-14] is to include the objective of harmonizing the legislation with that of the EU.
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