Title: | Health Risk-Oriented Source Apportionment of Hazardous Volatile Organic Compounds in Eight Canadian Cities and Implications for Prioritizing Mitigation Strategies |
Address: | "Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan 48202, United States" |
ISSN/ISBN: | 1520-5851 (Electronic) 0013-936X (Linking) |
Abstract: | "Traditionally, environmental authorities make regulatory policies for controlling volatile organic compound (VOC) pollution based on the mitigation of dominant VOC sources. However, the emission from each VOC source has a unique combination of VOC species of different toxicities. Without quantitatively assessing the health risk associated with each source, the effectiveness of the mitigation policy could be undermined. To address this shortcoming, we developed a new health risk-oriented source apportionment method that can provide quantitative health risk assessment and source-specific mitigation strategies for hazardous VOCs. We estimated that the integrated inhalation cancer risk (ICR) of hazardous VOCs was 7.7 x 10(-5) in Western Canada, indicating a 100% likelihood of exceeding Health Canada's acceptable risk level (1.0 x 10(-5)). Anthropogenic sources were responsible for 56.3-73.8% of cancer risks across eight Canadian cities except for the regional background island, where natural sources contributed over 77% to the integrated ICR. Thus, substantial environmental and health cobenefits could be achieved via reducing the ambient levels of benzene and 1,3-butadiene by 39.3-75.7 and 14-69.3%, respectively, and mitigating emissions from fuel combustion (by 31.3-54.1%), traffic source (3.0-36.8%), and other anthropogenic sources (5.3-20.1%) in Western Canada. Our study has significant implications for prioritizing air pollution mitigation policies, especially for quantitative reduction of hazardous air pollutants" |
Keywords: | *Air Pollutants/analysis Canada China Cities Environmental Monitoring *Ozone/analysis Vehicle Emissions/analysis *Volatile Organic Compounds Voc anthropogenic emissions health risk assessment mitigation policy source apportionment; |
Notes: | "MedlineXiong, Ying Huang, Yaoxian Du, Ke eng Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't 2022/08/09 Environ Sci Technol. 2022 Sep 6; 56(17):12077-12085. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.2c02558. Epub 2022 Aug 8" |