Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2013C00288:reg:6:p4
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2013C00288
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 6 (pt 4/5)
Character Range: 1475607–1478523

also be used to indicate the ability of chemical to leach to groundwater. A log Kow value <2 indicates a chemical has the potential to leach to groundwater.
Organic carbonwater partition coefficient (Koc) means the ratio of a chemical's solubility in organic carbon and water at equilibrium. This is widely used as a surrogate for the ability of a contaminant to accumulate in soils and conversely to leach to groundwater or to be removed by surface run-off. These are often expressed in the logarithmic form (that is, log Koc). Chemicals with a log Koc <2.4 were considered, in this guideline, to be mobile and therefore have the ability in some soils to leach to groundwater.
Precautionary principle is the general principle by which all that can reasonably be expected is done to prevent unnecessary risks.
Reference site is a relatively uncontaminated site used for comparison with contaminated sites in environmental monitoring studies or used for the assessment of ambient background concentrations of contaminants.
Risk assessment is a process intended to calculate or estimate the risk to a given target organism, system or sub-population, including the identification of attendant uncertainties, following exposure to a particular agent, taking into account the inherent characterisations of the agent of concern as well as the characterisation of the specific target.
Risk means the probability in a certain timeframe that an adverse outcome will occur in a person, a group of people, plants, animals and/or the ecology of a specified area that is exposed to a particular dose or concentration of a chemical substance; that is, it depends on both the level of toxicity of the chemical substance and the level of exposure to it.
Secondary poisoning is the product of biomagnification and toxicity.
Soil quality guideline (SQG) is a collective term used to describe any quantitative or qualitative limit that controls the concentration of contaminants in soils. Ecological investigation levels (EILs) are a type of SQG.
Soil-specific soil quality guidelines is a suite of concentration-based values, where each value applies to a soil with different physicochemical properties. These values take into account properties of soils that modify the bioavailability and toxicity of contaminants. These can only be derived if normalisation relationships are available. Compare these to generic SQGs.
Speciation is the exact chemical form of contaminant in which an element occurs in a sample.
Species sensitivity distribution (SSD) is a suite of methods that are the main method used to derive quality guidelines for contaminants in different compartments of the environment (for example, soil, water, sediment). Basically, these plot toxicity data (one value per species) as a cumulative frequency distribution against the concentration at which the toxic effect occurs. A statistical distribution is then fitted