Assessment of the contribution of surfactants to mixture toxicity in French surface waters

Surfactants are widely used ‘down-the-drain’ chemicals with the potential to occur at high concentrations in local water bodies and to be part of unintentional environmental mixtures. Recently, increased regulatory focus has been placed on the impacts of complex mixtures in aquatic environments and the substances that are likely to drive mixture risk. This study assessed the contribution of surfactants to the total mixture pressure in freshwater ecosystems. Environmental concentrations, collated from existing French monitoring data, were combined with estimated ecotoxicological thresholds to calculate hazard quotients (HQ) for each substance, and hazard indices (HI) for each mixture. Two scenarios were investigated to correct for concentrations below the limit of quantification (LOQ) in the dataset. The first (best-case) scenario assumed all values