Passive sampling has made enormous advancements over last few decades and has become popular as a tool to measure a wide range of contaminants, especially for organics. A number of passive samplers have been developed and available for these contaminants. They mainly include semi-permeable membrane device (SPMD), silicone rubbers, low density polyethylene (LDPE) for hydrophobic compounds, and diffusive gradients in thin-films (DGT), polar organic chemical integrative sampler (POCIS), Chemcatcher for hydrophilic compounds. Compared with the conventional sampling methods, such as grab sampling, passive sampling offers a number of distinct advantages, i.e. in situ time-integrating and labor-saving continuous monitoring, lower detection limits, cleaner sample matrices and easier sample storage.
The aquatic environment is an important pool for anthropogenic contaminants. Many organic contaminants (including traditional and emerging persistent organic pollutants, endocrine disrupting chemicals, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, polar pesticides, algal toxins, disinfection by-products and etc.) are discharged into the aquatic environment and could be transported globally. They can bio-accumulate in organisms, bio-magnify through the food-chains and could finally threaten the sustainable development of ecosystems and human health. Passive sampling has been extensively applied for monitoring these contaminants in the surface water (freshwater, seawater), even groundwater, and sediments in associated environment around the world. This approach can also be used to study biogeochemical processes/cycles and fates of these contaminants in the aquatic environment or processes between interfaces of the water and sediment, and their effects (namely bioavailability) on aquatic organisms.
In this presentation, we plan to show the advances of passive sampling for organic contaminants with several examples of development and applications of these techniques for monitoring the organics in the aquatic environment, utilising different passive sampling devices, which demonstrate the advantages of the techniques.

Passive Sampling,Organic Contaminants