Screening of pesticides for environmental partitioning tendency

The partitioning tendency of chemicals, in this study pesticides in particular, into different environmental compartments depends mainly on the concurrent relevance of the physico-chemical properties of the chemical itself. To rank the pesticides according to their distribution tendencies in the different environmental compartments we propose a multivariate approach: the combination, by principal component analysis, of those physico-chemical properties like organic carbon partition coefficient (K-oc), n-octanol/water partition coefficient (K-ow), water solubility (S-w), vapour pressure and Henry's law constant (H) that are more relevant to the determination of environmental partitioning. The resultant macrovariables, the PCl and PC2 scores here named leaching index (LIN) and volatality index (VIN), are proposed as preliminary environmental partitioning indexes in different media. These two indexes are modeled by theoretical molecular descriptors with satisfactory predictive power. Such an approach allows a rapid pre-determination and screening of the environmental distribution of pesticides starting only from the molecular structure of the pesticide, without any a priori knowledge of the physico-chemical properties. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.