A Risk Assessment Tool for the metal Finishing Industry

摘要

The EPA Common Sense Initiative (CSI) Metal Finishing Sector's Naational Metal Finishing Environmental Research & Development Plan identified developing procedures and tools to characterize risks to workers and neighbors of facilities as a principal need for this sector. A first response by EPA to address this need was the publication of a primer onrisk assessment specific to this industry: Characterizing Risk at Metal Finishing Facilities (Brown, 1998). This primer described the approach taken at EPA to evaluate exposure and human health risks to contaimainants in the environment, and how that approach can be applied to the metal finishing industry. Very generally and briefly, the risk assessment paradigm is comprised of four components: (1) hazard identification-the determination of the human health hazard posed by exposure to a particular contaminant; (2) dose-response assessment-the quantitative description of the human health response given a particular dose regime for a contaminant; (3) exposure assessment-the description, including quantification, the exposure of a human to a contaminant; and (4) risk characterization(the compilation of information from the first three steps of the paradigm to make quantitative or qualitiative statements regarding potential health risk. EPA's next step is reported on in this paper: To actually develop a user-friendly computer tool that allows an individual to evaluate the potential exposures and health risks to workers and nearby residents from emissions from individual metal finishing facilities.