SETAC North America is in Portland this year, 16–20 November 2025. As one of our favorite conferences of the year for the best in emerging contaminants occurrence, fate and toxicity, SGS always attends and presents! And I hope you will too, This year, I will be cochairing two sessions sponsored by the Chemistry Interest group. Do take a look at those, but there are so many others to choose from.
4.20 – Occurrence Fate and Effects of Contaminants in Domestic, Agricultural, Landfill, and Industrial Waste
Track 4. Chemistry and Exposure Assessment
Chair(s): Bharat Chandramouli James McCord Ruth Marfil-Vega
Chemistry
This is a diverse session, though it’s been PFAS heavy the last few years. As the title suggests, it’s all about contaminants in waste streams so if you study waste in any form, you might find a home here.
Description
Management systems for domestic waste (i.e., on-site, and municipal wastewater, and municipal landfills), agricultural waste and runoff, and industrial waste such as produced water from hydraulic fracturing operations, legacy and current landfill operations and more represent major potential sources and vectors of chemicals to the environment. These wastes are complex mixtures of nutrients, salts, metals, microbes, and various organic chemicals including certain contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) (e.g., pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs, personal care products, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), flame retardants, plasticizers, solvents), naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM), oil derivatives, glycol polymers, ethoxylated alcohols, quaternary ammonium compounds and likely many others still yet unreported. The chemicals themselves may perturb human and ecological health but also offer the ability to serve as tracers for tracking waste co-contaminants. In addition, studying the partitioning of substances between the liquid and solid waste streams as well as transformation can provide insight into environmentally relevant physicochemical properties and fate. Waste and waste-impacted environments are challenging to study, confounded by the enormous number and diversity of chemicals, complex sample matrices, and influence of transport and fate mechanisms. This session will aim to highlight advancements in the techniques and approaches being used to improve our understanding of chemicals (particularly CECs) in domestic, agricultural, and industrial waste. Research topics covered in this session include the occurrence and fate of these chemicals, their use as tracers to probe fate, transport, and physicochemical properties, characterize effects on biota exposed to waste in the receiving environments, and emerging treatment methodologies. We invite research covering the broad range of sources and pathways including municipal wastewater treatment systems, landfills, agricultural sources and runoff, and industrial sources such as produced water, as well as less conspicuous releases including on-site septic systems, wastewater lagoons, leaking sewers, historic landfills, and the land application of sludge and biosolids.
4.10 – Environmental Fate: Elucidating the Mechanisms and Kinetics of Chemical Transformation Products
Track 4. Chemistry and Exposure Assessment
Chair(s): Kevin Stroski Tristan Smythe Bharat Chandramouli
Chemistry
If your work has to do with how contaminants transform in the environment, this is the session for you!
Description
Transformation processes have important impacts on the transport and fate of contaminants in natural and engineered systems. Investigation of chemical transformation is essential to inform environmental and human health risk assessment, sustainability assessment in green chemistry, and development of remediation technologies. This session will focus on abiotic (e.g. photolysis, oxidation, reduction, hydrolysis) and biological (microbial transformation and metabolism) reactions that transform environmental contaminants into known and novel products. The properties of contaminants can change significantly due to transformation, with important implications for environmental fate and toxicity. For example, some chemical compounds have short environmental half-lives but form persistent transformation products with conserved or increased toxicity. Others are precursors to toxic reactive intermediates. Identification of transformation products enables the evaluation of contaminant mass balance and elucidation of reaction mechanisms. Characterization of products formed during water treatment processes is necessary to determine whether contaminants have been degraded, retained, or transformed. Additionally, identifying biological transformation products is critical to understand toxicokinetics and toxic effects of contaminants in humans and wildlife. In this session, new knowledge related to environmental and biological transformation pathways, contaminant reactivity, reaction kinetics, and transformation product identification will be presented with the goal of understanding the implications of contaminant transformation for human and ecological health. We welcome abstracts characterizing reactions in diverse environments including, but not limited to, surface water, wastewater, air, interfaces, indoor spaces, treatment systems, and within humans and other biota.
