You are here:
Exposure-Relevant Consumer Product Usage Information Derived from Longitudinal Purchasing Data
Citation:
Isaacs, K., R. Tornero-Velez, M. Nye, AND T. Buckley. Exposure-Relevant Consumer Product Usage Information Derived from Longitudinal Purchasing Data. ISES Annual Meeting, Henderson, NV, Henderson, NV, October 18 - 23, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.
Description:
Consumer products that are used in and around the home are a dominant source for anthropogenic chemical exposure. Prediction of the population distribution of chemical exposures encountered due to the residential use of consumer products (such as personal care products, cleaning products, pesticides, and pet products) require information about the corresponding distribution of consumer product use. Probabilistic chemical exposure models, such as EPA’s Stochastic Human Exposure and Dose (SHEDS-HT) model take as input variables describing population prevalence, frequency, and mass of product use for a wide variety of specific consumer product types. Herein, a year-long (Jan-Dec 2012) dataset of individual consumer purchases for over 60000 households was analyzed to formulate prevalence estimates and purchased mass distributions per week, month, and year for over 150 product categories relevant to chemical exposure. Median purchase cycles for each category were investigated and estimates of mass per cycle day were calculated. There were strong trends seen in purchase cycle length; many products were purchased on either 30 or 60 day cycles, suggesting that container size may be a reasonable surrogate for use per month for similar products not specifically characterized here. A cluster analysis was performed for total mass in ounces of product purchased in each household for both individual product categories and more aggregated product groups. For the aggregated groups, 85% of the variance in mass purchased across the population could be explained by 50 household clusters; for product categories, 75% of the variance could be explained by 70 clusters. These clusters define groups of consumers with unique purchasing habits, and will form the basis for classification models for consumer behaviors based on demographic and geographic characteristics. These data will allow for improved modeling of population variability in chemical exposures due to consumer product use.
