Application of the European reference soil set (EUROSOILS) to a HPLC-screening method for the estimation of soil adsorption coefficients of organic compounds

Abstract During the last decade the increasing concern on the impact of commercial substances that come into contact with man and nature has led to numerous guidelines for the determination of parameters that may be used for the environmental risk assessment of those compounds. One of these parameters is the soil adsorption coefficient, which is of paramount importance for the fate of environmental chemicals in the soil compartment. As it is impossible to measure this coefficient for all existing substances, suitable screening methods which give reproducible and traceable data for its accurate estimation are urgently needed. In this paper the methodology of a recently proposed HPLC screening technique was combined with soil adsorption coefficients derived from classical batch experiments with the five most frequent European soil types introduced some years ago as the so-called EUROSOILS. The adsorption data obtained for more than 40 non-ionic organic chemicals belonging to different substance classes could be correlated successfully with the respective retention behaviour in a liquid-chromatographic system, thus allowing the estimation of soil adsorption coefficients for the EUROSOILS based on a single measurement of a chemical's HPLC capacity factor (k′).