Additionally, Langdon et al. (2012) could not estimate a degradation half-life as they saw no apparent loss at all in the field and a separate laboratory study where triclosan was applied to the soil through the addition of dried triclosan pellets produced a half-life of 301 days (Langdon et al., 2011), which exceeds the 180 day REACH persistence threshold. There is a need to obtain a better insight in to the mechanisms that could be responsible for the variation in
degradation half-lives reported. For example, temperature and soil moisture content could affect biological transformation, volatilisation, photodegradation, bioturbation, run-off and leaching.