ABSTRACT
This chapter presents data on the half-life (HL) of the Toxics Release Inventory chemicals and a method for converting these to a persistence factor (PF). The developed PF is based on how much of a chemical would accumulate in the environment over an average 70-yr life span or the residual if 1 lb of the chemical were released to the environment each year for 70 yrs. The developed PF is based on the amount of chemical initially released plus the residual amount that would accumulate through release of an additional pound each year over the remaining 69 yrs. Subsequently, the media-specific HLs were averaged to obtain a chemical-specific average HL. Specifically, the chemical- and media-specific HLs were obtained for the organic TRI chemicals for water, soil, sediment, and air from the United States Environmental Protection Agency Persistent, Bioaccumulative, and Toxic Profiler.
