Criteria pollutant impacts of volatile chemical products informed by near-field modelling

Abstract

Consumer, industrial, and commercial product usage is a source of exposure to potentially hazardous chemicals. In addition, cleaning agents, personal care products, coatings, and other volatile chemical products (VCPs), evaporate and react in the atmosphere producing secondary pollutants. Here, we show high air emissions from VCP usage (≥ 14 kg person −1 yr −1 , at least 1.7× higher than current operational estimates) are supported by multiple estimation methods and constraints imposed by ambient levels of ozone, hydroxyl radical (OH) reactivity, and the organic component of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) in Pasadena, California. A near-field model, which estimates human chemical exposure during or in the vicinity of product use, indicates these high air emissions are consistent with organic product usage up to ~75 kg person −1 yr −1 , and inhalation of consumer products could be a non-negligible exposure pathway. After constraining the PM 2.5 yield to 5% by mass, VCPs produce ~41% of the photochemical organic PM 2.5 (1.1 ± 0.3 μ g m −3 ) and ~17% of maximum daily 8-hr average ozone (9 ± 2 ppb) in summer Los Angeles. Therefore, both toxicity and ambient criteria pollutant formation should be considered when organic substituents are developed for VCPs in pursuit of safer and sustainable products and cleaner air.

Reactive organic carbon emissions from volatile chemical products

“…Reactive organic carbon (ROC), which includes both nonmethane organic gases and organic aerosol (OA), is central to atmospheric oxidant levels and modulates the concentration of all reactive species (Heald and Kroll, 2020;Safieddine et al, 2017). Gas-phase ROC features both biogenic and anthropogenic sources and, following oxidation, can lead to the formation of tropospheric ozone (O 3 ) and secondary organic aerosol (SOA).…”

Development of an integrated approach to the selection of remediation measures and environmental technologies for their implementation

“…The assessment of the level of environmental hazard of factors affecting the environment is carried out on the basis of a methodology that includes four main stages [6,7]:…”

“…Such an assessment should be carried out continuously and in fact across the entire spectrum of negatively affecting the environment, which is currently being carried out on the basis of the global environmental monitoring system [6,7]. At the international level, such a system operates under the auspices of the World Environmental Monitoring Center UNEP-WCMC, which provides for:…”

“…However, at present, research continues in the field of development and improvement of the monitoring system with the participation of various international environmental organizations based on the implementation of the following most important principles for organizing environmental monitoring [7,8]: complexity, systematicity, uniformity, continuity, problematic organization (when the research and observation program unfolds only for a specific problem), development (providing for a system of feasibility, that is, implementation and completion of projects, as well as creation of new ones), management priority (when one of the monitoring results is knowledge transferred for decision-making), integrity (ensuring the continuity of the triad "management -monitoring -forecast "), information transparency (when a necessary condition for efficiency, all the results of environmental research and observations should be available to managers, entrepreneurs, politicians, the general public), efficiency (providing for the prompt processing and issuance of information, as well as decision-making).…”

Modeling secondary organic aerosol formation from volatile chemical products

“…Secondary organic aerosol (SOA) is often the dominant component of OA (Jimenez et al, 2009) and is formed when gas-phase volatile organic compounds (VOCs) react with atmospheric oxidants to form products that condense into the aerosol phase, where they can undergo further reaction. SOA is formed via thousands of atmospheric reactions (Goldstein & Galbally, 2007), so understanding its sources remains a challenge.Volatile chemical products (VCPs) are an important source of organic emissions that lead to SOA formation Qin et al, 2021). As vehicle exhaust becomes cleaner and mobile source emissions decline, the relative importance of VCP emissions increases (Khare & Gentner, 2018).…”