Wastewater-Based Epidemiology as a New Tool for Estimating Population Exposure to Phthalate Plasticizers

. Concentrations in raw wastewater were converted into levels of exposure to six phthalate diesters. For two of them, these levels were always below the daily exposure thresholds recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the European Food Safety Authority. For the other four, however, estimates of exposure surpassed such a threshold (especially the toddler threshold) in some cases, highlighting the significance of the exposure to phthalates in children. Finally, concentrations in wastewater were also used to estimate metabolite concentrations in urine, providing a reasonable concordance between our results and the data obtained in two previous biomonitoring studies.