World Water Day is an annual event celebrated on 22 March, aiming to remind people to save water because of the water shortage worldwide. Water is an essential resource for human, but subject to pollution by many pharmaceuticals due to the intensive use in the past few decades. Professor Alistair B.A. Boxall from York University, also a visiting professor of SERI, is leading a programme of Global Monitoring of Pharmaceuticals, to understand the global picture of pharmaceutical pollution in waters. SERI is one of the partners for this programme, responsible for sampling of waters from Pearl River.
On March 22, Research Professor Chang-Er Chen, Dr. Jun Chen and two master students Yuwei Jia and Beibei Li from SERI participated this sampling campaign. They collected waters from the key tributary, main stream of Pear River, upstream and downstream of wastewater treatment plants. The sampling time was selected to avoid the high tide period, the key water parameters such as temperature, pH were recorded as well the GPS data.