“…The soils in these sites are usually highly contaminated with a range of compound classes including phenols, cresols, aliphatic hydrocarbons, benzenes, PAHs and sundry organics such as dibenzofurans, etc. [10]; [41].The coal-tar itself consists of 2-300 components, less than half of which can be identified with traditional analytical techniques [48], and has high levels of PAHs, particularly high molecular mass compounds (in contrast to creosote, above), with PAH (20 PAH) constituting> 80% of the quantified organic compounds in the tar residues from one study [22]. Table 3 compares concentrations of compounds from studies on coal-tar from the USA (including the [22]) and the UK.…”