A critical assessment of the environmental fate of linear and cyclic volatile methylsiloxanes using multimedia fugacity models.

We apply multimedia models to systematically evaluate the fate profile of cyclic volatile methyl siloxanes (VMS) D, D and D, and the linear VMS L and L using recently reported measurements of their partition ratios between organic carbon and water (K), their salting out constants (K), and their enthalpy of sorption to organic carbon (ΔH). Our assessment follows a multi-stage strategy where the environmental fate of the chemicals is explored in generic regional models with increasing fidelity to the real system and in a region-specific model. Modeled emissions of VMS to air remained in air and were degraded or advected out of the system with overall residence times ranging from 2.