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Data-driven estimation of chemical releases from end-of-use management scenarios
Citation:
Hernandez-Betancur, J., Gerardo J. Ruiz-Mercado, John P. Abraham, W. Ingwersen, Raymond L. Smith, David E. Meyer, AND Michael A. Gonzalez. Data-driven estimation of chemical releases from end-of-use management scenarios. AIChE Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL, November 10 - 15, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation describes a work on estimating releases of chemicals when these are transferred to an off-site facility for their recycling, recovery, and/or reuse. The chemical end-of-life management at off-site facilities may present unanticipated health risks that EPA and its Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics must evaluate, as described in the Toxic Substances Control Act as amended by the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. The overall evaluation may involve risk assessment, including evaluations of chemical releases, exposures, and hazards. The data-reconciliation and learning-from-data framework will be useful to support TSCA risk evaluation by means of rapid estimation of industrial chemical releases during end-of-life management scenarios, which are not currently analyzed.
Description:
The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) to establish a risk process evaluation to determine whether a chemical poses a considerable risk to the human health or the environment. Consequently, as a part of the procedure for chemical risk evaluation, the USEPA has developed models to understand the relationship between a chemical and a potential receptor, either human or the environment. As part of the effort to meet the TSCA requirements, USEPA published in 2016 an initial list of the first 10 chemicals substances to address risk evaluation. In the conceptual models developed for the 10 substances, the pathways considered can be expanded to releases of chemicals when these are transferred to an off-site facility for their recycling, recovery, and/or reuse, as well as waste treatments regulated by any USEPA statute different to TSCA. Therefore, for dealing with the current needs and considering that the current TSCA Chemical Substance Inventory lists around 85,000 chemicals, this work proposes an end-of-life data-reconciliation and learning-from-data framework. This approach is based on existing USEPA databases for predicting releases that occur following the abovementioned end-of-life management at off-site facilities. The data-reconciliation framework will be useful to support TSCA risk evaluation by means of rapid estimation of industrial chemical releases during end-of-life management scenarios, which are not currently analyzed. Therefore, a chemical substance under interest might be tracked in its composed industrial life-cycle and a learning-from-data generalization would be applied for existing and new chemical substances in the U.S. market which are not currently reported in USEPA databases.