Phenol, Cyanide, and Thiocyanate in Aquatic Media: The Ecotoxicity of Individual Substances and Their Mixtures

Abstract

Although the coking industry is a major polluter, it is still an important and irreplaceable industry in many countries. Wastewater from the coking industry typically contains large amounts of various hazardous substances, including phenols, cyanides, and thiocyanates; we conducted a comprehensive study on their ecotoxicity. This included five different toxicity tests with common species from different trophic levels: the bacteria Aliivibrio fischeri and Pseudomonas putida, the microalgae Chlorella sp., the duckweed Lemna minor, and the onion plant Allium cepa. These tests have rarely or never been used for these three toxicants. The results show that cyanide generally has the highest toxicity, while phenol has a relatively equal or higher toxicity than thiocyanate, depending on the test. Since no data on the joint toxic action of these three toxicants can be found in the literature, and although their joint occurrence in the aquatic environment is very likely, we performed joint toxic action analysis. The analysis was performed for binary and ternary mixtures of the toxicants using the Aliivibrio fischeri test. The concentration addition model was used as a reference model for the toxic behavior of these mixtures. The results obtained showed a synergistic deviation from the concentration addition model for combinations of phenol with cyanide and with thiocyanate, while the combination of cyanide and thiocyanate led to additive toxic behavior.