Environmental Chemistry

This course covers pollutant chemicals in the environment with a focus on water and soil. The focus is on hazardous and toxic chemicals such as benzene, trichloroethane, pesticides and PCBs. In this course, environmental chemistry serves as a vehicle for study of chemical thermodynamics. Students gain an understanding of Gibbs free energy, chemical potential, and fugacity, and the universal applicability of thermodynamics to describe equilibrium and kinetic processes such as phase partitioning.