What approaches should be used to prioritize PPCPs for research on environmental and human health exposure and effects?

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) released from multiple anthropogenic sources and as such have a ubiquitous presence of PPCPs in the environment. The environmental exposure and potential effects of PPCPs to biota and humans has aroused concerns within the scientific and public communities. Risk assessments are commonly conducted to evaluate the likelihood of chemicals including PPCPs that pose health threats to organisms inhabiting various environmental compartments and humans. As there are thousands of PPCPs currently used, it is impractical to assess the environmental risk of all PPCPs due to data limitations and the fact that new PPCPs are continually being produced. Prioritization approaches, based either on exposure, hazard, or risk, provide a possible means by which those PPCPs that are likely to pose the greatest risk to the environment are identified, thereby enabling more effective allocation of resources in environmental monitoring programs in specific geographical locations and ecotoxicological investigations. In this review, the importance and current knowledge concerning PPCP occurrence and risk are discussed and priorities for future research, in terms of PPCP exposure (e.g., optimization of exposure modelling in freshwater ecosystems and more monitoring of PPCPs in the marine environment), or hazard (e.g., differential risk of PPCPs to lower versus higher trophic level species and risks to human health) are proposed. Recommended research questions for the next 10 years are also provided, which can be answered by future studies on prioritization of PPCPs. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Environ Toxicol Chem 2022;00:0-0. © 2022 SETAC.