"EMISSION INVENTORY OF INDIVIDUAL PCBs CONGENERS IN JAPAN" 

Lee Cheal Song, Haruyuki Higashino, Isamu Ogura, Kikuo Yoshida

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

8th International Conference for Atmospheric Sciences and Applications to Air Quality (Tsukuba, Japan 2003/3/13)

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Abstract

PCBs were widely used as insulating oils in transformers and capacitors, carbonless duplicating papers, machine oils, and paints etc. because they are chemically stable, durable to heat, and have insulating properties PCBs in equipments of open systems was banned to use since 1970 and production, import, and all of using equipments including PCBs were banned substantially at 1974 and the storage of old PCBs equipments that passed their lifetime period became obligation at 1974. 

Equipments containing PCBs are used in the limited places at present. However due to the high toxic and cumulative properties of PCBs, we need to clarify the distribution of PCBs concentration in the environment. Emissions of PCBs were estimated by multiplying the fuel consumption and amount of burning in each category by the emission factor (EF). 

Anthropogenic PCBs emissions were estimated in five major categories. : 1) Waste incinerations, 2) Metal industries, 3) Fossil fuel incineration facility including industrial boilers, 4) Leakage from storages of equipments including PCBs, 5) Waste-disposal facilities. 

We used available Japanese EF, otherwise we used the EF that investigated in other countries. Anthropogenic emissions of PCBs were estimated in each prefecture of Japan, and then for PCBs emission inventory of smaller scale than prefecture, we allocated prefecture’s emission to 5km×5km grid by using fuel consumption, burnout quantity, budget of each industry and incinerator.

We estimated the distributions of PCBs concentrations by using the ADMER (Atmospheric Dispersion Model for Exposure Risk assessment) and compared them with observed data.

Keywords

emission, PCBs, congeners, risk, assessment