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This book targets professionals or advanced students in any field of environmental science where understanding and predicting the environmental fate of organic chemicals is desired. The authors have successfully compiled a comprehensive set of fundamental concepts that provides the quantitative tools necessary to evaluate the fate of organic chemicals in the environment and to qualitatively develop your "chemical intuition." This second-edition book has served as the text for my graduate course in environmental organic chemistry for four years and the first edition for nine years prior. Through this course, this text has served to date more than 300 graduate and senior-level undergraduate students from multiple disciplines, including civil, environmental, and agricultural and biological engineering, soil science, earth and atmospheric sciences, chemistry, biology, and natural resources and environmental sciences.
This second edition improves upon the first edition with better organization and generally more consistent presentation throughout the text. The second edition also has a substantial amount of new material, including a chapter on partitioning into biota, an expanded section on modeling tools, and inclusion and expansion of the originally separate publication of illustrative examples, problems, and case studies. The book consists of 25 chapters organized into five distinct sections. Each chapter includes useful figures and tables as well as illustrative examples and concludes with concept questions and a quantitative problem set. Located at the end of the book are five appendices, including physicochemical properties for numerous organic compounds, a comprehensive bibliography, subject and compound indices, and a list of illustrative examples that can be found throughout the text.
Part I (Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2) introduces the general topic of organic chemicals in the environment, the processes that govern their fate, a brief guide to the book, and the makeup and personality of organic chemicals, followed by a brief review of nomenclature. Part II (Equilibrium Partitioning between Gaseous, Liquid, and Solid Phases, Chapters 3–11) constitutes more than one-third of the main text and is devoted to partitioning or phase transfer of organic chemicals between various environmentally relevant phases from an equilibrium perspective. The first chapter (Chapter 3) of this section introduces some key thermodynamic principals along with the use of equilibrium partition coefficients. Two quantitatively comprehensive chapters (Chapters 4 and 5) on vapor pressure and solubility follow. These chapters provide a conceptual picture of the intermolecular interactions occurring in a pure condensed phase that control partitioning of the compound into air and water (aqueous solubility). The fundamental concept of activity and how activity coefficients in various phases are defined and used to increase predictive accuracy are introduced. The remaining chapters with one exception are devoted to the quantitative evaluation of compound distribution between phases, including air–solvent (Chapter 6), organic liquid–water (Chapter 7), organic matter–water (Chapter 9), biota–water, and biota–air (Chapter 10), and inorganic surface–water or inorganic surface–air distribution (Chapter 11). Chapter 8 addresses prediction and use of acid-based dissociation constants followed by how pH-dependent speciation affects partitioning. Part III (Transformation Processes, Chapters 12–17) focuses on the key abiotic and microbial transformation processes, including highlights of the thermodynamic and kinetic concepts relevant to transformation processes (Chapter 12), hydrolysis and other nucleophilic reactions (Chapter 13), redox reactions (Chapter 14), direct and indirect photolysis (Chapters 15 and 16), and microbial degradation (Chapter 17).
Part IV (Modeling Tools: Transport and Reaction, Chapters 18 through 25) includes an overview of transport phenomena with an initial focus on diffusive transport (Chapter 18) followed by transport at boundaries (Chapter 19), transport phenomena specific to the air–water interface, (Chapter 20), basic box modeling approaches (Chapter 21), and lastly, coupled advective and diffusive transport in space and time (Chapter 22). Part V (Environmental Systems and Case studies, Chapters 23–25) provides a set of case studies focused on lakes (Chapter 23), rivers (Chapter 24), and aquifers (Chapter 25). Through these case studies, a further understanding of integrating the principals presented throughout the text is gleaned, as well as the extent to which simple models can provide reasonable estimations.
The shortcomings of this book are few, but include the lack of examples and phenomena specifically related to vadose zone transport as well as a missed opportunity to connect some of the fundamental concepts presented to remediation solutions. Also, no book is without some points of irritation of which most surfaced in the revision of the first edition to the second. In the second edition, the authors add a few pages introducing the use of equilibrium partition coefficients in Chapter 3. However, the style and terminology used are likely to be too unfamiliar to many readers until they have gone through the next couple of chapters; thus they may become quickly overwhelmed. One additional irritation that would only be experienced by those of us who were heavy users of the first edition is the switch from the standard state of 1 atm, which is the more common terminology among environmental professionals, to the technically more correct reference of 1 bar (0.987 atm) in the second edition. This slight change in reference states means values in previous solutions (e.g., for homeworks sets) attained using the 1 atm standard state are slightly, but noticeably, different. Something I miss from the first edition are the figures that with a glance gave the reader an understanding of how vapor pressure, solubility, Henry's Constant (KH), and octanol–water partition coefficients (Kow) change within a compound series for several compound sets. You will have to access the first edition to get these. Lastly, although the level of information for each topic is generally consistent, in a few cases the authors get too detailed when the topic relates to some of their newer research efforts. On the other hand, in some cases because a topic is not directly within their related research, it is labeled an "Advanced Topic" followed by the concepts being presented in a convoluted manner, making it needlessly difficult for the student to ascertain (e.g., log-linear enhanced solubility by organic cosolvents in Chapter 5). Another challenge the reader will face is a myriad of subscripts and superscripts, which can be overwhelming initially, but as concepts are understood, the notation scheme begins to become somewhat intuitive. The most common complaint is that the book is larger (33" L by 26.25" W by 6" H) and heavier (10 lbs.) than any book most students have owned. From the first to the second edition, the number of pages nearly doubled, and though the additions have value, the new page layout includes large empty margins. The latter may have been provided for note taking; however, the publishers should have considered a design that at least approached the ease of carrying of the first edition, which was a comfortable size (7.8" L by 1.5" W by 9.5" H) and weighed only 3 lbs.
Although many students in my course find the text challenging at first, by the end of the course, most find the book an asset as they pursue their graduate research and later as an environmental professional. In addition to the students gaining an in-depth understanding of the fate of organic compounds in the environment, the multiple opportunities provided throughout the book for quantitative problem solving yields students who exhibit much less apprehension when approaching complex problems, especially for the non-engineering students. In summary, even with its few shortcomings, this is an excellent and highly recommended book for acquiring a working knowledge along with the quantitative skills for addressing problems and solutions involving the environmental fate of organic chemicals. A word of caution—there were two printings of the second edition. One version was printed near the end of 2002 with a 2003 copyright, but this first printing has several errors that were later fixed for a larger second printing that actually occurred in 2003. There is no way to tell which printing you have without checking for the occurrence of one of the known errors, such as in Chapter 3 on p. 63 in Eq. (3–4), the last group of symbols should read (4
o)2; the "" was missing in the early prints. There is a 17-page erratum available if you happen to get a book from the first printing.
Dep. of Agronomy, Lilly Hall of Life Sciences, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN 47907
(lslee{at}purdue.edu).
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