The role of property-reactivity relationships in meeting the EPA's needs for environmental fate constants

During the next 10 years, the Environmental Protection Agency may consider as many as 70,000 chemicals for potential risk to humans and the environment. As many as 14 kinetic and equilibrium constants can be required for predicting the fate and transport of each chemical, and relatively few reliable constants are available in the literature. Laboratory measurement of the needed constants is prohibitively expensive (as much as $7 billion for all constants and chemicals combined) and too slow for rapid response to site-specific evaluations. Development of reliable computational methods holds promise of a 100-to 1000-fold reduction in cost of providing fate constants within a reasonable time frame.