Monitoring chemical contamination in water is a must to guarantee the supply to the society of this more and more scarce prized asset. The European Union as well as other bodies have released reports and directives defining lists of substances whose detection in waters should be prioritized and posing limits to the maximum allowable concentrations that drinking water must have. The scientific community has been actively working on the development of analytical tools that could be applied in the detection of hazardous chemical species in waters. Here, an overview of electrochemical devices with the potential of being implemented to the monitoring of the forty five pollutants include in the list of priority substances set in the 2013 EU directive that could be grouped into heavy metals, pesticides, hydrocarbons, halogenated hydrocarbons and alkyl phenols, is given, aiming at showing their benefits and limitations in this scenario.

P.N. acknowledges the China Scholarship Council for the award of a PhD fellowship (grant no. [2012]3013).

Peer reviewed