Bergman, A.; Ryden, A.; Law RJ; De Boer, J.; Covaci, A.; Alaee, M.; Birnbaum, L.; Petreas, M.; Rose, M.; Sakai, S.; van den Eede, N.; van der Veen, I. (2012) Organohalogen Compounds, 74: 1156-1159
Introduction
The number of environmental contaminants has increased dramatically over the past 50 years. One group of chemicals of concern is flame retardants (FRs) such as brominated-, chlorinated- and phosphorous FRs (BFRs, CFRs and PFRs). The European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) has over the last two years produced five hitherto adopted EFSA opinions 1-5 and one more is under way. These documents deals with food and feed exposure and the toxicity of the BFRs discussed, i.e. PBBs1, PBDEs2, HBCDDs3, TBBPA4 and its derivatives, phenolic BFRs including their derivatives (not TBBPA)5 and the final document deals with emerging and novel neutral BFRs. In addition, Eljarrat and Barceló edited in 2011 a book on BFRs6.
The large number of established, emerging, potential and novel FRs and the increasing number of publications dealing with all of those call for harmonized and simple abbreviations to avoid confusion in the area. In the literature it is not uncommon to find that several abbreviations is used to describe the same chemical or that one abbreviation may even be used to describe two different chemicals. In a recent article7, we propose abbreviations for halogenated and organophosphorus FRs using a two step procedure to establish Practical Abbreviations (PRABs). In the first step, Structured Abbreviations (STABs) are derived using specific STAB criteria based on the chemical structure of the FR. The STABs are helpful since they give useful information about the FRs structure. However, since some of the STABs are complicated and long, we proposed instead the use of the shorter PRABs. The PRABs are in most cases derived from the STAB, although, we also consider abbreviations extensively used in previous literature. This presentation will give the rational for how to derive STABs and also present the PRABs we propose for future use.