Little direct information on organic contaminant persistence exists
beyond sodium fluoroacetate, p-dichlorobenzene and chlordane. However,
these three contaminants represent a wide range of octanol water
partition coefficientwith log Kow values of−0.061, 3.4 and 6.2 for sodium
fluoroacetate, p-dichlorobenzene and chlordane, respectively. As
Kow increases, the propensity for a chemical to associate with octanol
(and not with water) increases, which can be used as a proxy for the
tendency of a chemical to associate with a solid surface, like drinking
water infrastructure, and not dissolve in water. Data is available on
chlordane and p-dichlorobenzene on cement-mortar and iron surfaces,
and with cement-mortar for sodium fluoroacetate. Future research
could focus on these three chemicals, and the resulting data could be extrapolated
to other chemicals with similar Kow values.