Deriving persistence indicators from regulatory water-sediment studies – opportunities and limitations in OECD 308...

The OECD guideline 308 describes a laboratory test method to assess aerobic and anaerobic transformation of organic chemicals in aquatic sediment systems and is an integral part of tiered testing strategies in different legislative frameworks for the environmental risk assessment of chemicals. The results from experiments carried out according to OECD 308 are generally used to derive persistence indicators for hazard assessment or half-lives for exposure assessment. We used Bayesian parameter estimation and system representations of various complexities to systematically assess opportunities and limitations for estimating these indicators from existing data generated according to OECD 308 for 23 pesticides and pharmaceuticals. We found that there is a disparity between the uncertainty and the conceptual robustness of persistence indicators. Disappearance half-lives are directly extractable with limited uncertainty, but they lump degradation and phase transfer information and are not robust against changes in system geometry. Transformation half-lives are less system-specific but require inverse modeling to extract, resulting in considerable uncertainty. Available data were thus insufficient to derive indicators that had both acceptable robustness and uncertainty, which further supports previously voiced concerns about the usability and efficiency of these costly experiments. Despite the limitations of existing data, we suggest the time until 50% of the parent compound has been transformed in the entire system (DegT(50,system)) could still be a useful indicator of persistence in the upper, partially aerobic sediment layer in the context of PBT assessment. This should, however, be accompanied by a mandatory reporting or full standardization of the geometry of the experimental system. We recommend transformation half-lives determined by inverse modeling to be used as input parameters into fate models for exposure assessment, if due consideration is given to their uncertainty.