“…Many semi-theoretical quantitative structure activity relationships (QSARs) have been proposed to parameterise sorption onto soils/sediments (Baker et al, 1997;Meylan et al, 1992), sorption onto activated carbon (Blum et al, 1994;Luehrs et al, 1996;Belfort et al, 1984), sorption onto wastewater solids (Dobbs et al, 1989), adsorption of organic vapours onto activated carbon (Urano et al, 1982;Nirmalakhandan and Speece, 1993;Prakash et al, 1994), dissolution of compounds (Kamlet et al, 1986;Lane and Loehrs, 1995;Speece, 1988, 1989;Dunnivent et al, 1992), Henry's law constants (Nirmalakhandan and Speece, 1988;Dunnivent et al, 1992;Nirmalakhandan et al, 1997;Brennan et al, 1998), chemical biotransfer (Dowdy et al, 1996), chemical toxicity (Blum and Speece, 1990;Xu and Nirmalakhandan, 1998); and octanolwater partition coefficients (Sablijic et al, 1993). It is well known that the physico-chemical interactions depend on chemical properties of the pollutant such as aqueous solubilities, octanol/water partition coefficients, or structural characteristics including substituted groups on the pollutant molecule, molar volume of the molecule, topology as well as the intrinsic properties like polarity and polarisability of the pollutant molecules (Westall et al, 1985;Kamlet et al, 1986).…”