Читать книгу Analytical Methods for Environmental Contaminants of Emerging Concern - Группа авторов - Страница 13

Pesticides are a class of chemicals used to limit, inhibit or prevent the growth of harmful animals, insects, weeds or fungi [2]. They can be classified according to different criteria, such as target organism, origin or chemical structure, but the most common is considering the target organism, being herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, etc., among others [3]. There are more than 800 active components and they are available in different accessible products [4]. Despite the benefits of the use of these compounds, they can be toxic to humans and many of them have been classified as endocrine disruptors, and carcinogenic effects have also been reported [5].

The widespread use of pesticides in combination with their physico-chemical properties, such as water solubility, octanol/water partition coefficient, volatility and stability against degradation by abiotic and biotic factors, are the reasons for their distribution and occurrence in different environmental matrices such as water, soil, air and biota [6] by physical processes as sedimentation leaching, sorption and volatilization.

Once pesticides are in the environment, they can be transformed by biotic or abiotic process [7], increasing the number of potential transformation products (TPs) that can be detected, and most of them are still unknown [8]. In this sense, TPs could also have environmental concern and so in addition to the parent compounds they should also be monitored in order to get a comprehensive overview of the environmental fate of pesticides.