Citation:

Hernandez-Betancur, J., Gerardo J. Ruiz-Mercado, J. Abraham, M. Martin, Wesley W. Ingwersen, AND Raymond L. Smith. Data engineering for tracking chemicals and releases at industrial end-of-life activities. JOURNAL OF HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. Elsevier Science Ltd, New York, NY, 405:124270, (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2020.124270

Impact/Purpose:

Chemical risk evaluation has been used as a support tool for alternative assessment via a strategy of informed substitution to select chemicals and materials with safer profiles. Also, the amended Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) instructs the USEPA to conduct risk evaluations of existing high priority chemicals to determine whether a chemical substance in the U.S. market may pose an unreasonable risk of harming the environment or human health across its life cycle stages. However, there is a continuous growth of the TSCA chemical inventory. Thus, evaluating the risk associated with end-of-life (EoL) activities is especially challenging due to more considerable uncertainty, less data availability, variability, waste mixtures, and the demands for proper reporting and traceability. Therefore, this research describes a data engineering framework for building an EoL database and tracking chemicals at the EoL stage and how it would be implemented to address and enhance the chemical risk evaluation process. The proposed framework performs a data engineering procedure to gather, clean, wrangle, and integrate information from publicly available USEPA databases such as the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), the Facility Registry Service (FRS), and the Substance Registry Services (SRS). Furthermore, information from other USEPA guidance documents, e.g., those within the TSCA New Chemical Program (TSCA NCP), are incorporated into the framework to support data cleaning, filtering, filling of data gaps, and transformation into machine-readable queries. Also, the framework automatically identifies whether a chemical is of concern under a USEPA environmental regulation, thereby helping to rule out exposure pathways that may not be of interest under a TSCA analysis. The EoL database considers waste flows generated by industrial facility activities and transferred for further management at off-site facilities. A relevant chemical of concern was used as a case study to prove how the framework systematically tracks chemical flows and estimates chemical releases at EoL activities. The EoL database may be used by TRI Program, the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT), the Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM), and the general public to identify off-site exposure scenarios at the EoL stage and estimate the quantities of the transferred chemicals that may be potentially released from these industrial EoL activities. Additionally, to collect and record the amount of chemical and its classification (e.g., acrylamides); type of EoL activity (e.g., recycling); the industry sector of recycling, energy recovery, treatment & disposal facility (e.g., materials recovery); and the environmental compartment where emission occurs (e.g., surface water, outdoor air).

Description:

Performing risk evaluation is necessary to determine whether a chemical substance presents an unreasonable risk of injury to human health or the environment across its life cycle stages. Data gathering, reconciliation, and management for supporting risk evaluation are time-consuming and challenging, especially for end-of-life (EoL) activities due to the need for proper reporting and traceability. A data engineering framework using publicly-available databases to track chemicals in waste streams generated by industrial activities and transferred to other facilities across different U.S. locations for waste management is implemented. The analysis tracks chemicals in waste streams generated at industrial processes and handling at off-site facilities and then estimates releases from EoL activities.

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