Chemical Fate and Transport in the Environment

Full disclosure: I am a student of the author. This is a graduate level intro textbook that braids together the several disciplines of environmental engineering, e.g. chemistry, hydrology, and biology, and gives an accessible quantitative treatment of the processes involved. I find this text generally useful for solving problems in environmental engineering because the central issues have been carefully distilled and the most relevant equations are easy to find and apply. This book is not a replacement for textbooks in chemistry or hydrology, but it ties everything together well for the environmental engineer...when you want to cut straight to the crux of the matter its the book you'll reach for first.

Overall I would say this is a well written and useful text. I used this text for a Graduate Level Civil Engineering class while working on my Masters. This is a good introductory text for understanding the basic concepts of advective and fickian transport of contaminants of concern. The concepts presented can be applied to pretty much any chemical. The text covers basic concepts, chemical distribution of phases, mechanisms responsible for physical transport, air-water exchange modeling, Redox reactions, dissolved oxygen modeling,determining partitioning coefficients among phases, transport within the subsurface enviornmental and processess within the atmosphere. I found that the section on Bio Accumlation Factor (BAF), Bio Concentration Factor (BCF), and determining the increasing concentration within each trophic level within the food chain of the system to be weak. Each chapter within the text is full of problem sets but there is no solution guide which would be helpful. I would recommend this text, however, I would also supplement certain sections with additional reading as required.

This is a reasonably priced textbook for advanced undergrad & grads studying the environmental sciences in Engineering, Hydrology, and Chemistry. Environmental consultants in the private sector could also employ this textbook as a reference. Harry Hemond (of MIT) and Liz Fechner-Levy (consultant in Bethesda, MD) deliver a quantitative treatment of processes. Battle-tested at MIT for many years, this volume features time-saving exercises at the end of each chapter and an accompanying solutions manual.