AWWA MTC95021

The dominance of atrazine use for weed control over the past thirty years has made it an almost universal component of streams and rivers in the Midwestern United States. This raises considerable concerns about its ultimate fate in surface and groundwaters. Atrazine is a para-nitrogen benzene ring with complex functional groups. NOM is the organic fraction of soil and sediments; the extractable portion (40-80%) is referred to as humic material. This dissolved humic fraction is believed to be chiefly involved in the sorption of pollutants onto organic matter and their subsequent mobilization. Information concerning the exact nature of atrazine-NOM interactions is limited. It is essentially the result of a shifting combination of charge-transfer and electron donor-acceptor mechanisms. Contact with humic molecules and other materials in solution controls atrazine's solvation, adsorption, hydrolysis, and biodegradation. The goal of this research was to study, at bench-scale, the permeation of atrazine in the presence of aquatic NOM. Rejection of atrazine in Oise River water solutions was investigated at 0.1 and 0.5 kDa.