Elements of Environmental Chemistry || Fates of Organic Compounds

✍ Scribed by Hites, Ronald A.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 268 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 047199815X
• DOI: 10.1002/9780470140451.ch5

✦ Synopsis

What happens to an organic compound when it is dumped into the environment? Clearly, the answer depends on the physical and chemical properties of the compound. For example, a big spill of methane will not cause a water pollution problem, but a major release of DDT could cause a big problem for biota. This chapter will provide a few tools for looking quantitatively at these issues. Of necessity, we will be brief, but for a more complete coverage, the reader is referred to the massive book by Schwarzenbach et al. 1 We will address the distribution of organic compounds in the environment by looking at equilibrium partitioning of organic compounds between environmental ''phases,'' which include air, water, soil, and biota. Taking these phases pairwise, we can define the various physical and chemical properties that control the partition coefficients between these phases: 1