https://www.sfei.org/documents/2019-pulse-bay-pollutant-pathwaysDownload the Pulse of the Bay! This report from the Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay features articles on the four major pathways by which pollutants enter the Bay: municipal wastewater, industrial wastewater, stormwater, and dredging and dredged sediment disposal. Each article provides a basic introduction to the pathway and discusses the regulatory framework, recent findings, and future challenges. The report also includes some of the latest highlights from monitoring of important parameters such as nutrients, emerging contaminants, mercury, PCBs, and selenium.
CD3 or Contaminant Data Display and Download is a web-based visualization tool for accessing water quality data for the San Francisco Bay-Delta region, including the RMP’s long-term dataset. The tool has been redesigned to leverage SFEI’s other interactive mapping efforts and debuts impressive new functionality, including enhanced spatial querying and generating dynamic statistical summaries and charts.
Other key benefits of the redesigned tool include:
The RMP has produced a synthesis report on PCBs that summarizes recent advances in understanding and makes recommendations for future studies. The report addresses nine priority management questions articulated by the RMP PCB Strategy Team.
The Annual Meeting of the Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay (RMP) was held on Tuesday, October 14, 2014 at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, CA from 9 AM to 4 PM.
We had an exciting line-up of speakers on the following topics:
Phil Trowbridge is the Program Manager for the Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay. The Bay RMP is a novel, multi-faceted regional monitoring program that uses pooled resources from dischargers and dredgers of San Francisco Bay to conduct and coordinate studies aimed at evaluating ecosystem health, characterizing sources and fate of contaminants, and informing potential management actions.
The Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay (RMP) recently published a technical report, authored by Dr. Rebecca Sutton of SFEI and her colleagues, that summarizes a series of RMP monitoring and research projects that have investigated the impacts of the flame retardants polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in San Francisco Bay.
In U.S. Pacific Northwest coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), stormwater exposure annually causes unexplained acute mortality when adult salmon migrate to urban creeks to reproduce. By investigating this phenomenon, we identified a highly toxic quinone transformation product of N-(1,3-dimethylbutyl)-N′-phenyl-p-phenylenediamine (6PPD), a globally ubiquitous tire rubber antioxidant. Retrospective analysis of representative roadway runoff and stormwater-affected creeks of the U.S. West Coast indicated widespread occurrence of 6PPD-quinone (<0.3 to 19 micrograms per liter) at toxic concentrations (median lethal concentration of 0.8 ± 0.16 micrograms per liter). These results reveal unanticipated risks of 6PPD antioxidants to an aquatic species and imply toxicological relevance for dissipated tire rubber residues.
About 3 billion new tires are produced each year and about 800 million tires become waste annually. Global dependence upon tires produced from natural rubber and petroleum-based compounds represents a persistent and complex environmental problem with only partial and often-times, ineffective solutions. Tire emissions may be in the form of whole tires, tire particles, and chemical compounds, each of which is transported through various atmospheric, terrestrial, and aquatic routes in the natural and built environments. Production and use of tires generates multiple heavy metals, plastics, PAH's, and other compounds that can be toxic alone or as chemical cocktails. Used tires require storage space, are energy intensive to recycle, and generally have few post-wear uses that are not also potential sources of pollutants (e.g., crumb rubber, pavements, burning). Tire particles emitted during use are a major component of microplastics in urban runoff and a source of unique and highly potent toxic substances. Thus, tires represent a ubiquitous and complex pollutant that requires a comprehensive examination to develop effective management and remediation. We approach the issue of tire pollution holistically by examining the life cycle of tires across production, emissions, recycling, and disposal. In this paper, we synthesize recent research and data about the environmental and human health risks associated with the production, use, and disposal of tires and discuss gaps in our knowledge about fate and transport, as well as the toxicology of tire particles and chemical leachates. We examine potential management and remediation approaches for addressing exposure risks across the life cycle of tires. We consider tires as pollutants across three levels: tires in their whole state, as particulates, and as a mixture of chemical cocktails. Finally, we discuss information gaps in our understanding of tires as a pollutant and outline key questions to improve our knowledge and ability to manage and remediate tire pollution.
