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The Risk-Informed Materials Management (RIMM) Tool System for Determining Safe-Levels of Contaminated Materials Managed on the Land
Citation:
Babendreier, J. The Risk-Informed Materials Management (RIMM) Tool System for Determining Safe-Levels of Contaminated Materials Managed on the Land. Sustainable and Healthy Communities BOSC Subcommittee Meeting, Cincinnati, Ohio, November 02 - 04, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
BOSC Review of the Sustainable and Healthy Communities Program, 11/2/16-11/4/16.
Description:
EPA’s Risk-Informed Materials Management (RIMM) tool system is a modeling approach that helps risk assessors evaluate the safety of managing raw, reused, or waste material streams via a variety of common scenarios (e.g., application to farms, use as a component in road construction, landfilling, etc.). RIMM can be used to study one or more sites located in the conterminous United States, where it can estimate actual and relative chronic health risks of contaminants present in materials (e.g., toxic metals and organic chemicals). RIMM decisions can help communities reduce disposal costs and use of raw materials by facilitating safe redirection of waste streams to beneficial reuses. Directly serving the programmatic goals of EPA in Sustainable Materials Management (SMM), the RIMM Tool System is an open, free, and readily accessible multi-component platform of interoperable decision-support and -analysis tools. With its abilities to directly address uncertainty in exposure and risk from toxicants, RIMM is designed to concomitantly support: (a) SMM-based Agency policy analysis and rulemakings, (b) stakeholder driven decision-making for SMM, and (c) a broad array of research needed to further advance multimedia modeling and model evaluation research programs within and outside the Agency. RIMM is both a methodology and technology for conducting integrated multimedia cumulative exposure and risk assessment of human and ecological receptors. RIMM uses or acquires best available site-scale scientific data to estimate ecological and human-health impacts created by placement of contaminated materials into landscapes. Site-specific assessments form the building blocks used to assess exposure and risk across multiple spatial-scales of interest (e.g. site, regional, national; county, state, tribal, Federal; etc.), where uncertainty and sensitivity in outcomes can also be assessed. A typical RIMM assessment has 3 steps: (Step 1) collect site-specific information at one or more sites across the U.S.; (Step 2) Run sets of multimedia modeling system runs across the site(s), tracking a range of scenarios; (Step 3): Evaluate exposure and risk results and decide safe-levels of contaminants in a material. RIMM allows users to study and compare one or more material management unit (MMU) types (e.g. landfill, pond or surface impoundment, roadway, pile, land application unit or farm, aerated tank). Against these options, users evaluate one or more metal and/or organic chemical contaminants in a given material.