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Contamination by priority substances and contaminated sediments are seemingly minor impacts in all water categories, affecting less than 20% of all classified water bodies, after excluding Sweden. The low percentage may be an artefact of the choices made by Member States on how to assess chemical status in the first river basin management plan in terms of chosen substances, standards (old vs. new EQS directive) and matrices (water or biota or sediment).  If other member states than just Sweden had also used biota standards of the new EQS directive, this impact would probably be larger. This would have implications primarily for chemical status classification, as most currently used assessment systems for ecological status classification are not sensitive to effects of hazardous substances.