Chemicals in the Environment: Fate and Transport
MIT's graduate course examines how man-made chemicals move through water, air, and soil, and what ultimately happens to them. Lectures cover physical transport mechanisms alongside chemical and biological sources and sinks that determine a pollutant's fate. The course links these transport processes to human health effects, discusses pollution sources and control strategies, and debates the policy questions that follow. Developed as a core class in MIT's Environmental M.Eng. program, the materials on MIT OpenCourseWare include lecture notes and assignments suited to students who already have a technical background in environmental engineering. The focus stays on real-world contaminant behavior rather than abstract chemistry, tracing a chemical's path from release into the environment through its eventual breakdown, dilution, or accumulation, and asking how that knowledge should shape regulation and cleanup decisions.