Workshop of the German Environmental Specimen Bank on monitoring of priority pollutants and emerging substances in sewage sludge

On behalf of the Environmental Specimen Bank (ESB) group of the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA), a workshop was organized to share experiences with experts from sludge monitoring programs, to balance the current state of research on the methodology and to discuss the need for sludge investigations for chemicals risk assessment. This report gives on overview on the presented data from several monitoring programs and on the discussions on strategies to use sewage sludge monitoring for the management of chemicals (e.g., in the context of the EU REACH Directive). Finally, the results from three working groups are presented which discussed the possible implementation of a sewage sludge monitoring within the German ESB program.