K values are used, among others, to assess the environmental fate of persistent organic pollutants. Chemicals with high partition coefficients, for example, tend to accumulate in the fatty tissue of organisms (bioaccumulation). Under the Stockholm Convention, chemicals with a log K greater than 5 are considered to bioaccumulate.
Furthermore, the parameter plays an important role in drug research (Rule of Five) and toxicology. Ernst Overton and Hans Meyer discovered as early as 1900 that the efficacy of an anaesthetic increased with increasing K value (the so-called Meyer-Overton rule).
K values also provide a good estimate of how a substance is distributed within a cell between the lipophilic biomembranes and the aqueous cytosol.