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Modeling Framework for Estimating Outdoor Emissions from Personal and Household Care Consumer Products
Citation:
Egeghy, P., K. Isaacs, B. Murphy, H. Pye, AND M. Qin. Modeling Framework for Estimating Outdoor Emissions from Personal and Household Care Consumer Products. Air & Waste Management Association’s 112th Annual Conference, Quebec City, CANADA, June 25 - 28, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This collaboration with colleagues within CED proposes a systematic approach for acquiring, combining, and processing the data needed to investigate potential effects on air quality due to chemical releases from wide variety of consumer products containing large numbers of VOCs and SVOCs. The effort also investigates how important indoor emissions from consumer products may be compared to other sources of emissions. The system for combining data sources with multiple models is novel and has the potential for strong impact.
Description:
Consumer products, including personal care products and household cleaning products, can be a significant yet relatively overlooked source of chemical emissions. Increased attention has been given to consumer products as an emerging source of urban VOCs emissions, with some estimates showing that emissions of VOCs from use of consumer products may exceed those produced by the transportation sector. Recent advances in modeling the emissions of chemicals from consumer products, and their subsequent fate and transport, offer the opportunity for better quantification of emissions and reaction products. These models, such as the EPA Office of Research and Development’s High Throughput Stochastic Human Exposure and Dose modeling System (SHEDS-HT), curate and integrate information on the chemical ingredients of products and population-level use patterns from a wide variety of sources to produce estimates of total release of specific chemicals aggregated across all types of products that contain those chemicals. For chemicals used in a broad spectrum of products, these releases can be quite substantial. For example, an average of nearly 20 lbs of ethyl alcohol is estimated to be released per person per year from the 75 product types identified as containing the chemical. Fugacity models within SHEDS-HT can then be used to estimate the mass emitted to the atmosphere through residential air exchange, and models such as EPA’s Community Multiscale Air Quality Modeling System (CMAQ) subsequently may be used to simulate atmospheric chemistry to investigate effects on air quality. This proposed framework for investigating potential effects on air quality due to chemical releases from consumer products is applicable to a relatively large number of VOCs and SVOCs. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this abstract are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
