ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the factors that influence the movement of organic pollutants in the subsurface and addresses the issue of the partitioning of organic chemicals in air, soil, and water. An ecosystem may be thought of as a series of homogeneous compartments such as air, water, soil, sediment, and biological material. Activated carbon is commonly used as a method of removing trace amounts of organic chemicals from aqueous solutions, such as an activated carbon filter. Octanol/water partition coefficient describes the distribution of a solute between two immiscible phases, octanol and water. Estimates of normalized distribution coefficients are commonly obtained from solubility or octanol/water partition coefficients rather than by the difficult and time-consuming direct determination of adsorption isotherms. The chapter examines the manner in which the distribution coefficient is integrated into the mass transport equation.
