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Abstract

Dechlorane plus (DP) was quantified by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) in soil and ambient air (collected from Harbin City, a typical northeastern Chinese urban region), water and sediment samples (collected in the segment within Harbin of Songhua River, located in northeast of China). The average concentrations of DP in sediment and soil samples were 123.6 pg g− 1 dry weight (dw), and 11.3 pg g− 1 dw, respectively. However, the concentration of DP in water was below the method detection limit (MDL). The inter-media comparison between water and sediment suggested that the sediment may be a receptor for DP. For air samples, two methods were used for collecting air in order to compare, active air sampling (AAS) and passive air sampling (PAS). The average concentrations of DP were 0.4 pg m− 3 and 6.9 pg m− 3 for AAS and PAS samples, respectively. Discrepancies of deployment period and different calculated method for DP concentration may help to explain the remarkable difference between PAS and AAS. Overall, DP in all matrices in Harbin City showed lower concentrations than that in the Great Lakes region. The anti-DP isomer was consistently greater than that of the syn-DP isomer in all matrices. The average fractional abundance of the syn-DP isomer (fsyn) was smaller than the technical DP composition (fsyn = 0.35) according to other studies in the Great Lakes region. As we know, this study is the first attempt to comprehensively study DP concentrations in four different matrices (water, ambient air, sediment and soil) in China.