ALTERNATIVES FOR THE DETERMINATION OF THE SOIL ADSORPTION COEFFICIENT, K-OC, OF NON-IONICORGANIC COMPOUNDS - A REVIEW

The determination of the soil adsorption behaviour of an environmental chemical is very important to the evaluation of potential dangers for man and nature. One of the major problems for European regulators wor king in the field of environmental protection and risk assessment is t he lack of complete and comparable soil sorption data, e.g. K-oc value s. The large number of existing chemicals makes it necessary to develo p and apply fast methods as an alternative to classical batch or colum n studies. Based on this context numerous approaches to estimate K, ha ve been published during the past two decades. In this paper more than 200 existing relationships for K-oc estimations have been reviewed an d divided into four categories. Regression equations for the most impo rtant classes of non-ionic organic environmental chemicals able to est imate soil adsorption coefficients are summarised, and the advantages and drawbacks of the different approaches are discussed briefly. Due t o the fact that a broad application of the proposed approaches is limi ted by the quality and comparability of the underlying experimental K- oc values reference soils are postulated to create a common basis for the comparison of soil adsorption coefficients. (C) 1997 Elsevier Scie nce Ltd.