Towards the design of organosilicon compounds for environmental degradation by using structure biodegradability relationships

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Authors

Organosilicon compounds have numerous applications in consumer products. After entering the environment most of them are resistant against microbial degradation and they persist in the environment.
Accordingly, they are ubiquitously present in the environment.
Therefore, better environmentally degradable organosilicon compounds are urgently needed. A systematic investigation of environmental degradability of organosilicon compounds allows to derive some general design principles, which in turn would enable chemists to reduce or better avoid environmental
persistence of organosilicon compounds in the environment. Therefore, in this study, all organosilicon substances registered in the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) database were evaluated for their environmental biodegradability. Results of own experiments with different organosilicon substances were added to extend the data basis. A dataset was generated. An assessment of all data was done and invalid data were excluded. The remaining 182 substances were grouped regarding their structure to derive general rules for the environmental biodegradability of organosilicon compounds. Nonbiodegradable at all were for example cyclic, linear and branched siloxanes. Groups like ethers, esters,
oximes, amines, and amides were prone to hydrolysis, which can result in readily biodegradable intermediates if they do not contain silicon functional groups anymore. This knowledge could be used for the design of better degradable organosilicon compounds as non-degradable substances should be
avoided if they enter the environment after their usage.
Original languageEnglish
Article number130442
JournalChemosphere
Volume279
Number of pages12
ISSN0045-6535
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.09.2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Water Resource Award of the Rüdiger Kurt Bode-Stiftung (Deutsches Stiftungszentrum, Germany, project ID TS0393/26885/2015/KG, awardee Klaus Kümmerer). We thank Tobias Schäfer, Dennis Troegel, Reinhold Tacke, Gerhard Schottner, and Norbert W. Mitzel for providing and synthesizing organosilicon substances for biodegradation tests. Evgenia Logunova and Morten Suk helped to execute the biological degradation tests. We thank Stefanie Lorenz and Ann-Kathrin Amsel for help with Schrödinger and QSAR Toolbox and Jakob Menz for fruitful discussions regarding the ECHA database and the QSAR Toolbox, as well as Reinhold Tacke, Dennis Troegel and Norbert W. Mitzel for introducing us to organosilicon chemistry.

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Water Resource Award of the Rüdiger Kurt Bode-Stiftung (Deutsches Stiftungszentrum , Germany, project ID TS0393/26885/2015/KG , awardee Klaus Kümmerer). We thank Tobias Schäfer, Dennis Troegel, Reinhold Tacke, Gerhard Schottner, and Norbert W. Mitzel for providing and synthesizing organosilicon substances for biodegradation tests. Evgenia Logunova and Morten Suk helped to execute the biological degradation tests. We thank Stefanie Lorenz and Ann-Kathrin Amsel for help with Schrödinger and QSAR Toolbox and Jakob Menz for fruitful discussions regarding the ECHA database and the QSAR Toolbox, as well as Reinhold Tacke, Dennis Troegel and Norbert W. Mitzel for introducing us to organosilicon chemistry.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd

    Research areas

  • Chemistry - biodegradability, Enviromental behavior
  • Biodegradation, Environmental, Hydrolysis, Organosilicon Compounds, Silicon, Siloxanes

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