Abstract
AbstractThe large number of historical and current organic chemicals in commerce, and the ability of these compounds to make their way from industrial to remote regions, has resulted in concerted efforts to predict which chemicals have the capacity to migrate from where they are used/disposed to areas such as the Arctic. A suite of 120 high production volume chemicals has been recently screened from an initial dataset of >100,000 compounds and listed as potential Arctic contaminants. In the current work, we critically assess members of this proposed list for their possible rapid reactivity in environmental systems that would prevent substantial accumulation or transport in the environment and accumulation in vivo, as well as whether the investigated physicochemical properties are adequate for the intended environmental screening purposes.
Highlights
Isocyanates (e.g., CAS 329011, 102363, and 34893920), epoxides (e.g., 428591), anhydrides (e.g., 115275), and peroxides (e.g., 78637 and 3457612) are reactive toward hydrolysis. This suggests the following compounds should perhaps be removed from potential Arctic contaminant screening lists due to their likely very short persistence in environmental and biological systems: The list of 120 proposed potential Arctic contaminants is given in Appendix Table 1
We have previously shown that fluorotelomer iodides may have hydrolytic half-lives of ~130 days in natural waters,[9] suggesting that CAS 2043530 and 2043541 may not be sufficiently persistent to become potential Arctic contaminants
Acyl halides are too reactive toward aqueous or atmospheric hydrolysis to be transported intact from industrial sources to remote regions, or to exist long in environmental systems or in vivo
Summary
The large number of historical and current organic chemicals in commerce, and the ability of these compounds to make their way from industrial to remote regions, has resulted in concerted efforts to predict which chemicals have the capacity to migrate from where they are used/disposed to areas such as the Arctic.[1,2,3,4,5] In the absence of reliable experimental data on the physicochemical properties of most commercial chemicals, and the lack of resources for monitoring environmental samples for all possible analytes, substantial progress has been made using computational tools such as property estimation programs (e.g., EPI Suite, COSMOtherm, SPARC, etc.) in concert with multimedia models (e.g., CalTOX, CEMCLIII, SimpleBOX, ChemRange, ELPOS, Globo-POP, BETR, etc.) to assess whether current or legacy compounds may be contaminating remote regions.[6,7] These methods are used to predict which new compounds and structural functionalities are likely to be sufficiently persistent, bioaccumulative, toxic, and amenable to long range transport to pose a risk to Arctic ecosystems. This suggests the following compounds (and similar molecules) should perhaps be removed from potential Arctic contaminant screening lists due to their likely very short persistence in environmental and biological systems: The list of 120 proposed potential Arctic contaminants is given in Appendix Table 1.
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