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USEPA’s Land‐Based Materials Management Exposure and Risk Assessment Tool System
Citation:
Babendreier, J., D. Womack, A. Parks, AND T. Taylor. USEPA’s Land‐Based Materials Management Exposure and Risk Assessment Tool System. 2015 SRA Annual Meeting, Arlington, VA, December 06 - 10, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
To be presented at the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) 2015 Annual Meeting
Description:
It is recognized that some kinds of 'waste' materials can in fact be reused as input materials for making safe products that benefit society. RIMM (Risk-Informed Materials Management) provides an integrated data gathering and analysis capability to enable scientifically rigorous analysis of exposure, risks, benefits, and opportunities for the safe, beneficial reuse of a wide variety of materials that may in the past have been considered to be 'waste'. RIMM enables assessors and decision-makers they support atall levels - from communities to states to the Nation - make better, science-informed decisions about material management within U.S. landscapes. Better decisions will result in reduced disposal costs, increased protection of public health and the environment, and an overall reduction in the use of alternate raw materials. As one of its major components, the RIMM Tool System includes the HeRMES modeling system (Human and Ecological Exposure and Risk in Multimedia Environmental Systems), a collection of science models, databases, and tools that work integrally with each other within the FRAMES v2.0 modeling framework infrastructure (Framework for Risk Analysis in Multimedia Environmental Systems). HE2RMES allows use rs to study the effects of liquid, semi-liquid, or solid materials placed within one of several"material" management units (i.e., source-release models). Using a combination of fate and transport models, food web and food chain models, exposure and risk models, and risk summary models, HE2RMES can be used to assess exposure and risk to ecological andhuman receptors in and around a site. HE2RMES can also be used to study impacts at multiple sites across a county, a given tribal land, a state, a region, and/or the entire U.S. The RIMM Tool System also establishes a fully implemented D4EM-4-HeRMES solut ion (Data for Environmental Models). Servicing all of HeRMES's models, the solution allows for Anywhere USA application of RIMM.