Establishing a ready biodegradability test system using OxiTop (R) to evaluate chemical fate in a realistic environment

The purpose of this study is to propose the use of OxiTop (R) for measuring biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) under the Japanese Chemical Substances Control Law in order to properly evaluate chemical fate in a real environment. In our previous study, the biodegradation of test chemicals was accelerated by both adsorbing the chemical to silica gel with chloroform and increasing the medium volume from 300 to 3900 mL in the OECD 301F test using a coulometer. However, the biodegradability of these chemicals could not be evaluated based on BOD due to chloroform residue in the silica gel, or the medium volume could not be increased further due to the oven size of the coulometer. In this study, we established an evaluation system using OxiTop (R) based on BOD by increasing the medium volume to 9000 mL. Based on triplicate testing, increasing the medium volume accelerated biodegradation and decreased variation in BOD.