The assement of chemical persistence is an important part of legislative protection of the environment and human health. Of the vast number of chemicals on the market today few have been properly assessed. The coordination between testing guidelines from different frameworks is limited and especially the methods for determination of biodegradation show poor reproducibility because of their highly complex nature.

In order to circumvent the multifactorial assessment methods that involve the use of e.g. soils and sediments an attempt to create a new approach to chemicals assessment was postulated by Green and Bergman in 2005. This approach puts the focus on testing the chemical reactivity of the compound in environmentally relevant transformation/degradation reactions, i.e. reduction, oxidation, hydrolysis-substitution-elimination (hse), radical reactions, and photolysis. These tests are to be performed in controlled abiotic laboratory experiments ensuring that the results reflect the transformation rate of the intended type of reaction for the investigated substance. To achieve an assessment of the presistence of the compound, the test results are then combined with data on physicochemical properties of the compound and a mathematic matrix describing the reactive power of the different types of reactions in each environmental compartment (air, water, soil, and sediment).

Thus far methods for testing of oxidation, photolysis, and hydrolysis-substitution-elimination reactions have been developed. Within this thesis a method for determining reduction was developed and further utilised to determine transformation products from reductive debromination of the three nonabrominated diphenyl ethers. The previously established method for hse was evaluated and further developed in a study of selected chlorobenzenes. Some novel brominated flame retardants were investigated using the previously developed photolysis method, and transformation products and quantum yields were determined. All of the papers presented within this thesis intend to build on the project of a new persistency assessment model. The results presented also contributes important information on the properties and transformation of some common organohalogen pollutants.