Determination of organic pollutants in land applied municipal wastewater sludges by toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP) and extraction procedure toxicity test (EP)

Triplicate wastewater sludge samples, from three small municipal facilities that received no industrial inputs, were analyzed by the Extraction Procedure Toxicity Test (EP) and Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP). These tests evaluate the potential for organic and inorganic chemicals to leach from the sludge. Six surrogate chemicals were spiked into the sludges to monitor recoveries of specific chemicals by the two procedures. The recoveries for the surrogate chemical spiked into the sludges were low (0.1−33%) and variable for both tests. EP and TCLP tests performed similarly in that both tests yielded highly variable results in terms of the number of chemicals and the concentrations detected in the replicate samples