Humans make more and more chemical compounds and they increasingly end up in the environment. That is why you need efficient approaches for detecting them in water samples. KWR Water Research Institute uses state-of-the-art high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) to simultaneously examine as many substances as possible.

Water safety and quality are essential to the survival of all life on earth. To ensure this safety, you need to know what is in the water. In the past, this was easier to find out than it is now, because the diversity of substances in the water has increased enormously. ‘The Chemical Abstracts Service published in April 2021 that the 250 millionth unique chemical substance had been registered’, says Ton van Leerdam, researcher and project manager at KWR Water. ‘That is an unimaginable amount. In the EU, more than twenty thousand substances are registered under REACH. All of them have the potential to end up in the environment, and thus also in our drinking water sources. That makes monitoring so important.’

In addition to target screening, in which you look for specific substances, more and more use is made of non-target screening. Leerdam explains: ‘It is an ingenious combination of high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS, ed.), gas and liquid chromatography, and computer technology in the form of fast algorithms, which we have been working with at KWR for some fifteen years.’