Once an organic contaminant enters the soil, it will interact with the soil constituents, changing its existing state in the soil, which in turns will reduce the mobility, the bioavailability and the chemical reactivity to a certain extent and will have significant impacts on the risks of organic contaminants to the environment and the ecosystems as well as on the efficiencies of remediation technologies. The changes in the mobility, the bioavailability and the chemical reactivity are related with each other but have their own features. The bioavailability of the organic contaminants depends not only on the existing state of the contaminant in the soil but also on the absorption process of the organisms, and hence, there are many different understandings among different research fields about the meaning of bioavailability. In this paper, the recent research progresses on the bioavailability of the organic contaminants in the soil are reviewed from the view of the interactions between the soil and the organic contaminants. The meaning of the bioavailability is discussed, and different evaluation methods are compared. In addition, the impacts of the soil media factors, the soil organisms, the chemical properties and the aging on the bioavailability of the organic contaminants in the soil are highlighted.

organic contaminants  /  bioavailability  /  soil