Principal Investigator Philip Gschwend
In order to improve our fundamental understandings of chemical sorption to real world sediments, we need to elucidate the role of black carbon(s) (e.g., soots, chars, coal dust) in these deposits. Such BC sorption greatly reduces the bioavailability of a wide range of organic contaminants. This improved understanding will have a several important impacts including: (a) improved understanding and modeling of bioavailability when site managers are using sediment concentration data, (b) enhanced means to use and interpret passive samplers when assessing wide arrays of target compounds using only a few performance reference compounds, (c) insights to kinetic limitations associated with phenomena like contaminant desorption from resuspended sediments, (d) an ability to pre-judge the sorption of a far more diverse array of organic contaminants and (e) more accurate expectations for risk reduction associated with remedial efforts since BC sorption exhibits nonlinear behavior.