Yong-Jin Kim*, Masahiro Ohsako** and Dong-Hoon Lee*

* Department of Environmental Engineering, Univ. of Seoul
** Department of Waste Management Engineering, National Institute of Public Health

+ Correspondence should be addressed to Yong-Jin KIM:
(90 Jeonnong-dong, Dongdaemun-ku, Seoul, Korea)

Abstract

From previous studies, we, the authors collected and arranged the octanol-water partition coefficients (Kow), water solubilities (S0), and partition coefficients (Koc) to dissolved humic matter (DHM) of 94 organic compounds, and presented the correlations between each physical property. To estimae the effect of DHM on sorption and retardation, strong reductions in sorption and retardation factors were obtained resulting from increasing the DHM concentration. The Koc and Kow of PCDDs/DFs estimated were significantly increased while S0 was decreased on increasing the chlorine number. Also the solubilities (Sw) of organic compounds in coexistence with DHM increased when increasing their Koc values. Thus, the ratio of solubility enhancement (Sw/S0) in high chlorinated PCDDs/DFs such as HpCDDs and OCDD is higher than that in low chlorinated ones. Also the ratio of solubility enhancement (Sw/S0) in PCDDs are greater than those in PCDFs because of the effect of DHM. The limitation, however, of this research is that the Kocs used are estimated, not measured values. To more accurately estimate the behavior of PCDDs/DFs, we need accurately measured Kocs and other factors not considered in this paper.

Key words: dissolved humic matter (DHM), octanol-water partition coefficient, solubility enhancement, partition coefficients to DHM, PCDDs/DFs