From a professional perspective, PCBs entered my life in 1978 while I was post-grad research associate at the U of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture. The mission of our lab was to develop data in support of EPA pesticide registrations for tropical crops. Pesticide registration is normally conducted by the pesticide manufacturers, but tropical crops are such a small niche market, that it isn’t worth their trouble in most cases.
One day the lab director brought a box with ten 8-ounce jars into my work area and put them down on my lab bench (tangential comment – this is the work area from which I had a view of three waterfalls, sigh). He told me each of the jars contained a different Aroclor PCB mixture and that the Hawaiian electric company wanted us to develop an analytical method to measure the amount of PCBs in transformer mineral oil. For the next couple of months, while working up the analytical method, these jars were front and center on my lab bench. These were not laboratory prepared analytical standards; these were jars containing pure (“neat” to you chemists) Aroclors.
As a young chemist the opportunity to work on an environmentally relevant project was a real thrill. As you likely know, the percent of chlorine in an Aroclor is indicated by the last 2 digits in the model number; so Aroclor 1221 contains 21% chlorine by mass and Aroclor 1268 contains 68% chlorine (Note: this numbering does not apply to Aroclor 1016 which is a modified version of Aroclor 1242 and thus contains 42% chlorine). The lighter Aroclors like 1221 and 1232 were as thin as machine oil. The mid weight Aroclors (1248 and 1254) were as viscous as motor oil. Aroclor 1268 was pretty much a solid at room temperature. Also, the lighter Aroclors were clear and the heavier ones had a darker quality to them.
On the chemistry side, there are 209 different PCB molecules (called “congeners”), and each of the Aroclors is a mixture of 50 or more of these congeners. Chemists sometimes organize the different congeners into groups based on the number of chlorine atoms they have and these groupings are called “homologs”. So for instance, all the different congeners that have three chlorines belong to the tri-chloro homolog group, all the congeners with four chlorines belong to the tetra-chloro homolog group, and so on.
There is an interesting difference among the Aroclors (interesting to me at least) that even many chemists are not aware of; each Aroclor PCB mixture is dominated by a different homolog group. So for instance, Aroclor 1221 is made up of 60% mono-chloro congeners (one chlorine), Aroclor 1248 is 56% tetra-chloro congeners (four chlorines), and Aroclor 1262 is 47% hepta-chloro congeners (seven chlorines). This formulation was not created by design; it was just an accident of the manufacturing process.
Meanwhile back at my lab at the U of H, and many, many gas chromatographic runs later, I did finally come up with a reliable method for measuring PCBs in transformer oil. Remember this was before there was an SW-846 (EPA’s compendium of analytical methods) or a Method 8082 (EPA’s PCB analytical method). The method I developed for measuring PCBs in transformer oils was actually published in the Journal of Chromatography (JOC) and the article can still be obtained on-line (the link is for the curious, but purchase is not recommended since this method has been superseded by better USEPA analytical procedures).
When I looked up the link to the JOC article to include with this post I was disappointed to see that the U of H College of Tropical Agriculture now has a trendier name, the “Department of Agricultural Biochemistry”. On the other hand, I was very pleased that when I clicked my name on the author list my address came up as “University of Hawaii, 1800 East-West Road, Honolulu, Hawaii”; on a cold windy late winter day it’s nice to still have an address in Hawaii.
In closing, let me acknowledge Dr. James Ogata who directed my work at the U of H lab and who prepared the manuscript for publication.
For help with PCB chemistry questions, please contact me at okun@oto-env.com.