Best Practice Guide on the Control of Arsenic in Drinking Water

Prosun Bhattacharya, David Polya, Dragana Jovanovic

• Publisher: IWA Publishing
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781780408866
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Applied Sciences
• Index: Biological Sciences

Arsenic in drinking water derived from groundwater is arguably the biggest environmental chemical human health risk known at the present time, with well over 100,000,000 people around the world being exposed. Monitoring the hazard, assessing exposure and health risks and implementing effective remediation are therefore key tasks for organisations and individuals with responsibilities related to the supply of safe, clean drinking water.

Best Practice Guide on the Control of Arsenic in Drinking Water, covering aspects of hazard distribution, exposure, health impacts, biomonitoring and remediation, including social and economic issues, is therefore  a very timely contribution to disseminating useful knowledge in this area. The volume contains 10 short reviews of key aspects of this issue, supplemented by a further 14 case studies, each of which focusses on a particular area or technological or other practice, and written by leading experts in the field. Detailed selective reference lists provide pointers to more detailed guidance on relevant practice.

The volume includes coverage of (i) arsenic hazard in groundwater and exposure routes to humans, including case studies in USA, SE Asia and UK; (ii) health impacts arising from exposure to arsenic in drinking water and biomonitoring approaches; (iii) developments in the nature of regulation of arsenic in drinking water; (iv) sampling and monitoring of arsenic, including novel methodologies; (v) approaches to remediation, particularly in the context of water safety planning, and including case studies from the USA, Italy, Poland and Bangladesh; and (vi) socio-economic aspects of remediation, including non-market valuation methods and local community engagement. 

© 2017 The Author(s) This is an Open Access book chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), which permits copying and redistribution for non-commercial purposes, provided the original work is properly cited and that any new works are made available on the same conditions (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). This does not affect the rights licensed or assigned from any third party in this book. The chapter is from the book Best Practice Guide on the Control of Arsenic in Drinking Water, Prosun Bhattacharya, David A. Polya and Dragana Jovanovic (Eds.).

DOI: 10.2166/9781780404929_001

Chapter 1

Arsenic in drinking water: sources & human exposure

David A. Polya and Daniel R. S. Middleton

School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Although the detrimental health impacts of chronic arsenic exposure from drinking water or beverages has been suspected for over 200 years (Martin, 1759; Neubauer, 1947; citing Egger, 1932; citing Lambe, 1809) and has been well documented for well over 100 years (Geyer, 1898; The Royal Commission on Arsenical Poisoning, 1903), it is only in the last 50 years (1964–2014) that there has been the extensive discovery of high arsenic drinking water supplies in many regions of the world. In the English language literature, reports of these include for: Taiwan (Chen & Chen, 1964), Chile (Zaldívar, 1974), northern India (Datta & Paul, 1976), Mexico (Cebrian et al. 1983), eastern India (Garai et al. 1984; Das et al. 1994; Chakraborti et al. 2009), UK (Farmer et al. 1989), Hungary (Varsanyi et al. 1991), USA (Frost et al. 1993), Bangladesh (Dhar et al. 1997), China (Sun et al. 1999), Vietnam (Berg et al. 2001), Cambodia (Polya et al. 2003a) and Nepal (Thanduker, 2000; Shrestha et al. 2003; Bhattacharya et al. 2003).

Notwithstanding these discoveries, particularly in Germany, Taiwan, Chile, Hungary and India, there has been an apparent widespread tardiness to recognise the importance of groundwater arsenic hazards. As late as 1999, the European Environmental Agency published an extensive report on groundwater quality and quantity in Europe (Scheidleder et al. 1999) that does not mention “arsenic”, presumably reflecting the paucity of relevant long-term monitoring data. Extensive drilling of what turned out subsequently to be arsenic contaminated wells in India and Bangladesh took place many years after high arsenic groundwaters and their ill-effects had been documented in Europe, South America and elsewhere in Asia. The lack of recognition of this hazard reflects in part a lack of effective distribution of local, regional and international scientific and technical knowledge. In part this may be because much of the early literature was not written in English – for example reports of groundwater arsenic in Argentina by Fernandez (1925) and in Germany by Geyer (1898, 1940) – however other reasons for the apparent lack of institutional awareness of the seriousness of arsenic hazard in drinking water systems must exist (at least in the English speaking world) given notable relevant English-language articles including the Royal Commission on Arsenical Poisoning (1903), Neubauer’s (1947) review of arsenical cancer and numerous epidemiological papers from C.-J. Chen and his group in Taiwan. Even Rachel Carson’s (1962) widely read totem of the early environmental movement, “Silent Spring”, notes briefly the health risks associated with the chronic consumption of high arsenic drinking water.

Within both many regulatory institutions and the scientific community, this situation has now substantially changed. The EEA’s 2013 report (Kodeš et al. 2013) on groundwater quality and quantity in Europe, superseding the EEA’s 1999 report, highlights non-compliance of groundwater supplies with European Union drinking water standards (10 µg As/L) in 13 European countries, (albeit not Hungary, Romania and Serbia, all countries where substantial arsenic groundwater arsenic hazard has been identified). At the time of writing (mid, 2014), there were around 5000 publications matching the topic keywords of “arsenic” and “drinking water” and these have been collectively cited over 100,000 times in other publications. The 2002 review of arsenic in natural waters by Smedley and Kinniburgh (2002) is one of the most highly cited papers in the Earth Sciences literature, whilst the highly cited reviews of Mandal and Suzuki (2002), Mohan and Pittman (2007) and Smith et al. (2000) now provide readily available information of arsenic distribution in natural waters, arsenic removal technologies and health impacts respectively.

This chapter aims to summarise some of the now extensive literature on arsenic occurrences in drinking water supplies and, together with reviewed data on water consumption rates, provide a perspective on the absolute and relative importance of drinking water as an arsenic exposure route across the globe. For the most part, these water supplies have derived from groundwaters (Section 1.2) contaminated with geogenic arsenic (i.e. arsenic of natural origin) but there are also examples of groundwaters with high anthropogenic arsenic and of high arsenic surface water supplies (Section 1.3), with arsenic of either geogenic or anthropogenic origin. For a more detailed account than is presented in this brief chapter of the distribution of arsenic in groundwater and surface waters, the reader is referred to Matschullat (2000), Welch (2000), Mandal and Suzuki (2002), Smedley and Kinniburgh (2002), Henke (2009), Ravenscroft et al. (2009), Barringer and Reilly (2013) and Polya and Lawson (2015).

1.2 ARSENIC IN GROUNDWATER SOURCES

Although many groundwaters do not contain arsenic at concentrations higher than the WHO provisional guideline value of 10 µg/L, many groundwaters do – high arsenic groundwaters are not unusual and any competent or prudent operator supplying groundwater as a drinking water supply, even perhaps in medium-term emergency circumstances, should be compelled to determine and report to the potential users whether or not the arsenic concentrations in the water supply are lower than at least local regulations require.

There is an abundant literature on the main causes of high arsenic hazard in various types of groundwater and this can be used to indicate regions of the world where high arsenic hazard may be more likely – see for example compilations and reviews by, amongst others, Smedley and Kinniburgh (2002) and Ravenscroft et al. (2009). Recently, geostatistical models incorporating consideration of environmental parameters that may influence the genesis of high arsenic groundwaters have been developed on both a global (Amini et al. 2008; Winkel et al. 2008) and a more local/national scale (Lado et al. 2008; Rodriguez-Lado et al. 2013; Sovann & Polya, 2014).

Many groundwater systems, particularly shallow systems hosted in complex sedimentary aquifers, are highly hetereogeneous. This means that high arsenic and low arsenic groundwaters may often be found in close proximity, giving rise to opportunities for well switching (van Geen et al. 2002). This heterogeneity also means that prediction of arsenic concentrations in yet-to-be-drilled wells may be a precarious business. Notwithstanding this, a consideration of plausible regional and local controls of groundwater arsenic concentrati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Definitions
• About this Best Practice Guide
• Disclaimer
• Foreword
• Dedication
• Executive summary
• Chapter 1: Arsenic in drinking water: sources & human exposure
• Chapter 2: Public health effects of arsenic exposure
• Chapter 3: Health surveillance and biomonitoring
• Chapter 4: Regulatory aspects of arsenic in drinking water
• Chapter 5: Sampling and analysis for monitoring arsenic in drinking water
• Chapter 6: Selection of arsenic remediation strategies in the context of Water Safety Plans
• Chapter 7: Arsenic remediation of drinking water: an overview
• Chapter 8: Sustainable arsenic mitigation – from field trials to implementation for control of arsenic in drinking water supplies in Bangladesh
• Chapter 9: Community awareness and engagement for arsenic management
• Chapter 10: Valuing the damage of arsenic consumption: economic non-market valuation methods
• Chapter A1: Arsenic hazard and associated health risks: New England, USA aquifers
• Chapter A2: Geostatistical modelling of arsenic hazard in groundwater
• Chapter A3: Estimating the population exposed to arsenic from groundwater-sourced private drinking water supplies in Cornwall, UK
• Chapter A4: Hair arsenic as a reliable biomarker of exposure to arsenic in drinking water
• Chapter A5: Automated on-site arsenic monitoring
• Chapter A6: ARSOlux – the arsenic biosensor
• Chapter A7: Centralized arsenic removal from drinking water in the United States
• Chapter A8: Survey of real scale water treatment plants in Italy
• Chapter A9: Case studies on best practice in Italy
• Chapter A10: Remediation case study: drinking water treatment by AOCF to target <1 µg L−1 effluent arsenic concentration
• Chapter A11: Control of arsenic in the European Union: case studies from Poland
• Chapter A12: Arsenic removal from water by reverse osmosis technology
• Chapter A13: Case study: the social context of arsenic regulation and exposure in South East Hungary
• Chapter A14: Groundwater sampling, arsenic analysis and risk communication: Cambodia case study
• Author Index
• Subject Index