Abstract Artificial sweeteners have been widely incorporated in human food products for aid in weight loss regimes, dental health protection and dietary control of diabetes. Some of these widely used compounds can pass non-degraded through wastewater treatment systems and are subsequently discharged to groundwater and surface waters. Measurements of artificial sweeteners in rivers used for drinking water production are scarce. In order to determine the riverine concentrations of artificial sweeteners and their usefulness as a tracer of wastewater at the scale of an entire watershed, we analyzed samples from 23 sites along the entire length of the Grand River, a large river in Southern Ontario, Canada, that is impacted by agricultural activities and urban centres. Municipal water from household taps was also sampled from several cities within the Grand River Watershed. Cyclamate, saccharin, sucralose, and acesulfame were found in elevated concentrations despite high rates of biological activity, large daily cycles in dissolved oxygen and shallow river depth. The maximum concentrations that we measured for sucralose (21 µg/L), cyclamate (0.88 µg/L), and saccharin (7.2 µg/L) are the highest reported concentrations of these compounds in surface waters to date anywhere in the world. Acesulfame persists at concentrations that are up to several orders of magnitude above the detection limit over a distance of 300 km and it behaves conservatively in the river, recording the wastewater contribution from the cumulative population in the basin. Acesulfame is a reliable wastewater effluent tracer in rivers. Furthermore, it can be used to assess rates of nutrient assimilation, track wastewater plume dilution, separate human and animal waste contributions and determine the relative persistence of emerging contaminants in impacted watersheds where multiple sources confound the usefulness of other tracers. The effects of artificial sweeteners on aquatic biota in rivers and in the downstream Great Lakes are largely unknown.

Citation: Spoelstra J, Schiff SL, Brown SJ (2013) Artificial Sweeteners in a Large Canadian River Reflect Human Consumption in the Watershed. PLoS ONE 8(12): e82706. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0082706 Editor: Tomoya Iwata, University of Yamanashi, Japan Received: April 5, 2013; Accepted: October 26, 2013; Published: December 11, 2013 Copyright: © 2013 Spoelstra et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Research on the Grand River was funded by an Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Strategic Project (STPGP 336807-06; www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction Artificial sweeteners (AS) are increasingly used as a sugar substitute to reduce caloric intake, for dental health protection and for control of diabetes. As a result of the use of artificial sweeteners in food and beverages and the ability of some of these compounds to pass non-degraded through wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), AS are being detected in rivers and lakes (e.g. [1]–[4]) and groundwater (e.g. [4]–[7]) around the world. Some AS are also able to pass through water treatment plants and are subsequently found in municipal potable water supplies (e.g. [2], [9], [10]), typically where the source water intake for one municipality is downstream from the WWTP discharge of another. One AS, acesulfame, is particularly resistant to degradation in WWTPs and has been proposed as an ideal tracer of wastewater in the environment (e.g. [2]). Acesulfame has been shown to be mobile and recalcitrant in groundwater [2], [5], [6], making it a suitable wastewater tracer in the subsurface as well as surface water bodies. Additionally, acesulfame removal by the various processes used in water treatment plants for the production of municipal potable water has been shown to be incomplete [9]. To investigate the concentrations and behavior of AS at the scale of an entire watershed, we conducted a study of the Grand River in Ontario, Canada. The Grand River Watershed in southern Ontario contains the largest Canadian river discharging to Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes bordered by Canada and the United States (Fig.1). Predominant land use in the watershed is agricultural (over 80%) but a large urban population (>600,000) is concentrated in the central portion of the watershed. A total of 30 WWTPs servicing a current population of approximately 800,000, discharge to the Grand River and its tributaries. The total population of the Grand River Watershed is currently 960,000 and expected to increase to over 1,400,000 by 2041 [11], with most of this increase occurring in urban areas on sewers. Currently, over 500,000 people rely on Grand River water for domestic use either directly after treatment (>120,000 people) or via groundwater recharge schemes. Therefore the ability of the Grand River to function both as a diluter/assimilator of waste and as a safe source of raw water for drinking water production, while conserving ecological health, is of vital concern. PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 1. Grand River Watershed (6,800 km2), Ontario, Canada. Numbered circles and red squares indicate the 23 sampling sites and 30 WWTPs, respectively. Site numbering starts in the headwaters and increases downstream, terminating at Port Maitland where the Grand River discharges to Lake Erie. The 3 largest WWTPs by rated capacity are Kitchener, Brantford and Waterloo. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0082706.g001 Analysis of artificial sweeteners (AS) presents an extremely powerful tool for tracing the impact of wastewater constituents on receiving waters. Nutrient loads to the Grand River are high due to intensifying agricultural activity and WWTPs, leading to high rates of river metabolism, large daily cycles in dissolved oxygen (DO) [12] and summer nighttime hypoxia below the largest WWTP (Kitchener). River discharge is heavily regulated by reservoirs used for flood prevention and low flow augmentation. To assess the load and persistence of AS in a highly impacted river, we conducted a longitudinal survey by selecting 23 sites over the 300 km river length, starting at the upper 2nd order reach and ending at the discharge point to Lake Erie where the river is 7th order (Fig. 1).

Methods Samples were collected along the length of the Grand River at 23 sites from headwaters to mouth (Fig.1). No specific permissions were required for these sampling locations since they were all publically accessible sites. In the upper one third of the watershed (sites 1–9), the surficial geology is characterized by glacial till. The urban reach near the center of the watershed (sites 10–12) is followed by a zone of higher groundwater recharge (sites 13–16) due to the presence of glacial moraines. The lower third of the watershed (sites 17–23) is covered by clayey tills and the topographic gradient is diminished. Maximum annual discharge increases from <1 m3/s at site 1 to >80 m3/s at site 23. Below the largest WWTP, nighttime hypoxia is a stressor because river DO varies from less than 1 mg/L on hot summer nights to over 14 mg/L during the day. Three sampling campaigns were designed to capture the effects of seasonal variability during lower flows and non-ice covered seasons when biological transformation should be the most effective: 14-June-2007 (early summer, peak photosynthetic activity), 5-September-2007 (late summer, end of growing season, past peak biomass) and 24-April-2009 (spring, higher flows and prior to the emergence of macrophytes). Samples were collected close to solar noon on the specified dates by teams of samplers who waded into the river to manually collect the samples or sampled from piers or bridges in the lower river sections. Travel time of the river from one sampling site to the next was not explicitly factored into the sampling design as sites were sampled at approximately the same time of the day (within 2 hours). Samples were kept on ice in the dark and filtered to 0.45 µm in the laboratory before being stored frozen until analysis. Stability data for samples processed to date shows no indication that freezing causes the four AS to precipitate out of solution (data not shown). Effluent discharge volume from the larger WWTPs exhibits daily fluctuations (a factor of 2.5) with peaks in morning and evening corresponding to the beginning and end of a normal workday. As a result, AS concentrations downstream from the WWTPs also vary on a daily cycle with changes in the dilution factor. Samples were collected at 6 to 8 sites within the effluent plume from below each of the two largest WWTPs (Kitchener, Waterloo) to a distance of 5 km in 2 different years. The plume location and highest concentrations were independently confirmed using conductivity, chloride and bromide. Results demonstrate the conservative nature of AS in the WWTP plume in the river at this distance (data not shown). Samples were also collected within the two largest WWTPs from the effluent stream every 3 hours on a diel basis on 4 occasions. Plume and WWTP samples were processed as above. Municipal water supply samples were collected from private residences at taps not influenced by additional treatment systems (e.g. water softeners). Prepared sample containers were filled and stored frozen prior to transport to the laboratory for processing and analysis. The four sweeteners were analyzed by ion chromatography (Dionex 2500 system) coupled with tandem mass spectrometry (AB Sciex QTRAP 5500 triple-quadrupole), operated in negative electrospray ionization (ESI) mode. Sample pre-treatment (e.g. SPE) is not required for this method, thereby increasing sample throughput compared to some other methods used for AS analysis. The minimum detection limits (mdl) for acesulfame, saccharin, cyclamate, and sucralose were 0.008, 0.021, 0.003, and 5 µg/L, respectively. Precision for the method is better than ±20% for all four artificial sweeteners. For sucralose, our mdl and practical quantification limit (pql: 15 µg/L) are relatively high compared to other analytical methods (e.g. 0.01 µg/L [3]) and therefore a detailed analysis of our sucralose data in the Grand River was not included here. A comprehensive description of the analytical methods has been published in the supplementary material (Appendix A) of Van Stempvoort et al. [4]. The field work conducted for this study did not involve endangered or protected species.

Conclusions Our study demonstrates elevated levels of AS in a large, human-impacted river. The ubiquitous occurrence of acesulfame in wastewater effluents, its high concentration coupled with the high sensitivity of available analytical methods, and its resistance to breakdown in both WWTPs and in groundwater and surface water environments, makes it an ideal tracer of human derived wastewater. Acesulfame will be particularly useful for studying groundwater - surface water interaction, nutrient assimilation and other wastewater constituents including emerging contaminants released to rivers, lakes, and nearshore marine environments. Acesulfame can be used to distinguish and quantify dilution versus attenuation and it circumvents problems of confounding source inputs common with other tracers such as chloride (e.g. road salt, groundwater inputs). Given the persistent nature demonstrated here and solely human source, we expect that acesulfame will become the most reliable detector of wastewater presence, dilution, and transformation in surface and ground waters.

Acknowledgments We thank Richard Elgood and the dedicated teams of students involved in the Grand River sampling campaigns and the individuals that provided us with domestic tap water samples. The Grand River Conservation Authority provided discharge data for the Grand River. Comments from two anonymous reviewers helped improve a previous version of this manuscript.

Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: JS SLS. Performed the experiments: JS SLS. Analyzed the data: JS SLS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: JS SLS SJB. Wrote the paper: JS SLS.