Walter Giger

Walter Giger ( born September 6, 1943) is a Swiss chemist. He worked at the Swiss Federal Institute for Water Resources, Environmental Science and Technology ( Eawag ), where he headed the Department of Chemical substances problem. Since 1 July 1995, he is also Adjunct Professor of Environmental Chemistry at the ETH Zurich. In 2005 he retired and founded his own company in order to continue researching in his territory.

Giger was one of the first that dealt with the development of methods for the trace analysis of organic environmental chemicals. He examined early on the behavior of trace substances in waste management, especially in wastewater treatment plants. In 1984 he first discovered that nonylphenol ethoxylates are degraded in sewage treatment plants to 4 - nonylphenol, which are toxic to many organisms and get significant amounts of it into the water. After many further studies and voluntary commitment by the industry, the use of nonylphenol ethoxylates and nonylphenol in the EU was severely restricted in 2003.

In September 2008, he dedicated the journal Environmental Science & Technology an issue.

Scientific career

Giger 1971 received his doctorate at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at ETH Zurich. In 1972 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In the same year he took a job at Eawag in Dübendorf. In the meantime, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 1987 and a lecturer at the University of Karlsruhe. Of the latter he was appointed Honorary Professor in 1991. In 2002 he was admitted as a member of the ISI Highly Cited Researchers Database.

Giger is a board member of the Division of Analytical Chemistry of the Swiss Chemical Society.