"The Exposure and Risk Assessment of Dichloromethane " 

Kazuya Inoue, Haruyuki Higashino, Hiroshi Yoshikado, Junko Nakanishi

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

SETAC 24th Annual Meeting in North America (Austin of America 2003/11/11)

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Abstract

Dichloromethane, also known as methylene chloride, is widely used in the industries and consumer products, which may have some adverse health effects to humans including carcinogenic effects. The risk assessment of dichloromethane has been conducted in several countries, but most assessments have not considered the distribution of the exposure concentration nor that of the population, due to lack of sufficient data of the measured concentration distribution.

 We conducted the exposure and risk assessment of dichloromethane, taking into account the spatial distribution of the concentration and the population by using some different types of models. The distribution of ambient concentration with the horizontal resolution of 5 km was estimated by using the Atmospheric Dispersion Model for Exposure and Risk Assessment (AIST-ADMER) after validating the performance of the model by comparing predicted concentration with measured concentration at some locations.

 The mean indoor concentration in each 5 km grid was estimated by the simple box model from the ambient concentration obtained by the AIST-ADMER. Furthermore the mean exposure concentration in each grid was estimated by using these concentrations and the ratio of the time spent outside and indoor. The fluctuation of the exposure concentration within 5 km grid was also discussed and was taken into account for the risk assessment of dichloromethane.

Keywords

dichloromethane, concentration, distribution, exposure, risk