In arid and semi-arid areas the use of treated wastewater for crop irrigation and other agricultural practices, such as the use of pesticides, increase the number of emerging contaminants (ECs) in crops. Hazards of these practices to human being are largely unknown since there are few studies yet covering a short range of compounds and most of them under non-realistic conditions. This study aims at assessing this problem that will become global soon in an area of Saudi Arabia heavily affected by the reuse of treated wastewater and pesticide in order to ascertain its scale. The novelty of the study relays in the large number of ECs covered and the variety of crops (cabbage, barley, green beans, eggplants, chili, tomato and zucchini) analysed. Extraction procedure developed provided an appropriate extraction yield (up to 50% of the compounds were recovered within a 70–120% range), with good repeatability (relative standard deviations below 20% in most cases) and sensitivity (LOQ < 25 ng g⁻¹) for the model compounds. Determination by liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight (LC-QqTOF-MS) is able to identify >2000 contaminants. Sixty-four ECs were identified in wastewater but of the sixty-four compounds, six pharmaceuticals (atenolol, caffeine, carbamazepine and its metabolites 10,11-epoxycarbamazepine, gemfibrozil, and naproxen) and seven pesticides (acetamiprid, atrazine deethyl, azoxystrobin, bupirimate, diazinon, malathion, pirimicarb and some of their metabolites) were detected in plants. Furhermore, one metabolite of the ibuprofen (not detected in water or soil), the ibuprofen hexoside was also found in plants. Up to our knowledge, this study demonstrate for the first time the accumulation of ECs in crops irrigated with treated wastewater under real non-controlled environmental conditions.

在干旱和半干旱地区，将经过处理的废水用于作物灌溉和其他农业实践，例如使用农药，会增加作物中新兴污染物的数量。这些实践对人类的危害在很大程度上是未知的，因为很少有研究涉及化合物的范围很短，而且其中大多数是在不现实的条件下进行的。这项研究旨在评估这一问题，该问题将很快在沙特阿拉伯一个受到已处理废水和农药再利用严重影响的地区变得全球性，以确定其规模。该研究的新颖性在于覆盖的大量EC，并分析了农作物（卷心菜，大麦，青豆，茄子，辣椒，番茄和西葫芦）的种类。^-1）用于模型化合物。通过液相色谱四极杆飞行时间（LC-QqTOF-MS）进行测定，可以识别> 2000种污染物。在废水中鉴定出六十四种EC，但在六十四种化合物中，六种药物（阿替洛尔，咖啡因，卡马西平及其代谢产物10,11-环氧卡马西平，吉非贝齐和萘普生）和七种农药（乙酰胺，阿特拉津去乙基，嘧菌酯，布比利特） ，二嗪农，马拉硫磷，吡虫威及其一些代谢产物）在植物中被检测到。此外，在植物中还发现了布洛芬的一种代谢产物（在水或土壤中未检出），布洛芬六糖苷。据我们所知，这项研究首次证明了在未经控制的实际环境条件下，用经过处理的废水灌溉的农作物中EC的积累。