The assessment of a hazard resulting from the pollution of the environment by chemical compounds is in principle limited to the determination of their concentrations in its various compartments. But for solving many problems in this context, knowledge of the emission sources, transport pathways, and sites of deposition is of great benefit. By far the largest amounts of pollutants, regardless of where they were discharged, end up...

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can enter the environment from various sources. They are synthetic chemicals and as such are present in the environment mainly as mixtures containing various amounts of PCB congeners. It is therefore difficult to pinpoint the source of PCB emissions into the environment and the pathways along which they migrate there. The situation is different where locating the emission sources of polycyclic aromatic...

The presence of sulfur in a solvent extract that is to be analyzed chromatographically impairs and sometimes precludes properinterpretation of the chromatogram, as the sulfur peak masks the peaks of other compounds present in the sample, and sulfur alsodisrupts the operation of the mass detector. This means that discrepancies in the results can lead to erroneous interpretations andfalse assessments of environmental risk. For this...