NORMAN Non-target screening (NTS) prioritisation scheme for ranking thousands of contaminants of emerging concern in effluent wastewater collected from Europe

Prioritisation of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) remains a challenging task of primary importance for environmental managers and the scientific community as regards the definition of priority actions for pollution prevention & control and for the allocation of resources to address current knowledge gaps. The NORMAN prioritisation scheme combines the traditional risk-based ranking process with the preliminary application of a decision tree, which allows the allocation of substances into six action categories, based on the knowledge gaps and actions needed to fill them, e.g. development of more powerful analytical methods, launch of monitoring campaigns and performing additional ecotoxicity tests. The ranking within each category is then evaluated by occurrence, hazard and risk criteria. The tremendous improvements in high-resolution mass spectrometry and the development of advanced chemometric tools resulted in the update of the NORMAN prioritisation scheme, so that it incorporates the automatic retrieval of the occurrence of CECs through retrospective suspect screening. The objective of the study was to present a) the updated NORMAN prioritization scheme and the modifications introduced and b) the application of the scheme for the prioritization of more than 40,000 CECs in 46 effluent wastewater samples collected from Europe.