Recently, Chemical & Engineering News, a magazine affiliated to American Chemical Society (ACS) and rated as one of the most popular sci-tech academic news magazines by the international community, has used the topic of “Fire retardant replacements migrate to arctic sediment” to report the latest research finding published by Ma Yuxin from the polar research team of the College of Marine Sciences of SHOU and his cooperator on TOP academic journal Environmental Science & Technology (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.7b00755). The research has found fire retardant replacements in arctic sediments.
In recent years, the global cycling problem of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), characterized by long persistence, toxicity, bioaccumulation and long-distance migration capability, has escalated into a global environmental problem, and the Arctic region is no longer a pure land insulated from human pollution. After brominated flame retardants poly brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) were put on the blacklist of POPs in the Stockholm Convention, organophosphate esters (OPEs) are being produced and consumed in large volume as their replacements currently, although their potential environmental effects are still unclear. Relying on the sediment samples acquired by the sampling platform of China’s polar scientific expedition ship “Snow Dragon” in the waters from the North Pacific Ocean to the Arctic Ocean, this research analyzes the content, composition and distribution of OPEs, discusses their long-distance transport potential, and calculated their sedimentation flux. It has been found for the first time that OPEs have the highest content among the sediments in the central Arctic Ocean region, even higher than the content of PBDEs replaced by them. Due to their extremely short half-life and their easiness to be degraded under sunshine, OPEs haven’t been rated as typical POPs, but they are still transported to remote Arctic sediments. This research finding raises a new question regarding whether the assessment mode proposed by the Stockholm Convention for long-distance transport of chemicals should be changed and whether other modes of transport should be considered.