An Integrated Approach to Assess Exposure and Health-Risk from Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in a Fastener Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

An integrated approach was developed to assess exposure and health-risk from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) contained in oil mists in a fastener manufacturing industry. One previously developed model and one new model were adopted for predicting oil mist exposure concentrations emitted from metal work fluid (MWF) and PAHs contained in MWF by using the fastener production rate (Pr) and cumulative fastener production rate (CPr) as predictors, respectively. By applying the annual Pr and CPr records to the above two models, long-term workplace PAH exposure concentrations were predicted. In addition, true exposure data was also collected from the field. The predicted and measured concentrations respectively served as the prior and likelihood distributions in the Bayesian decision analysis (BDA), and the resultant posterior distributions were used to determine the long-term exposure and health-risks posed on workers. Results show that long term exposures to PAHs would result in a 3.1%, 96.7%, and 73.4% chance of exceeding the PEL-TWA (0.2 mg/m3), action level (0.1 mg/m3), and acceptable health risk (10−3), respectively. In conclusion, preventive measures should be taken immediately to reduce workers’ PAH exposures.

The characteristics of atmospheric brown carbon in Xi'an, inland China: sources, size distributions and optical properties

“…As shown in Supplement Table S1, abs λ=365 nm extracted by methanol displays good correlations with PAHs, OPAHs and nitrophenols, especially in winter (r > 0.89), which suggests that those species are important light absorption con-tributors for BrC in Xi'an. Huang et al (2018) found that PAHs and OPAHs in Xi'an accounted for, on average, 1.7 % of the overall absorption of methanol-soluble BrC, but their mass fraction in OC was only 0.35 %. A recent study reported that biomass burning also emitted nitroaromatic compounds, particularly nitrophenols, and accounted for 50 %-80 % of the total visible light absorption (> 400 nm) (Lin et al, 2017).…”

“…Many studies have been conducted on the BrC optical properties in China, but most of those were based on PM 2.5 and PM 10 sample collection and focused on the bulk aerosol optical properties with no information on the size distributions (Shen et al, 2017;Huang et al, 2018). Xi'an is a metropolitan city located in Guanzhong Basin of inland China, which is a typical semiarid region in East Asia and has been suffering from serious particle pollution due to the large emission of anthropogenic pollutants (Wu et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2019), especially intensive coal combustion and biomass burning in winter for house heating (Wang et al, 2017).…”

Modeling Bayesian Networks from a conceptual framework for occupational risk analysis

“…Modeling made possible through distributions of probability amid uncertainties, provided by the BNs, to become appropriate to model the occupational risks, considering that it allows inference from hypotheses and on the relationship between risk factors. However, the risk is a changeable data when it regards to time (among other aspects), and modeling through the BNs satisfies this logic, as it stimulates stochastic processes (Englehardt et al, 2003;Hsu et al, 2014;Puncher et al, 2013;Xing et al, 2013).…”

“…It is possible to highlight some results obtained with the application of the BNs in the analysis of occupational risk, namely: (1) In the transport sector, the results indicated that human factors were, among the direct factors, the most responsible for accidents, and among the indirect factors, the major influence was related to road conditions (Zhao et al, 2012); (2) In a study applied in the sector of industry, services and civil construction, it was shown that accidents at work had a strong direct relationship with the global set of hygiene and ergonomic factors, indicating that poor working conditions have a significant effect on health and safety in companies (García-Herrero et al, 2012a); (3) Intending to infer about the risks of occupational exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the industrial sector, it was identified that prolonged exposure results in 74.4% chance of exceeding the acceptable risk of exposure (Hsu et al, 2014).…”

The characteristics of atmospheric brown carbon in Xi'an, inland China: sources, size distributions and optical properties

“…Beyond that, BrC also influence the atmospheric chemistry and human health. For example, BrC can shield polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from being oxidized, and thus substantially elevate lung cancer risk from PAHs (Hsu et al, 2014;Yan et al, 2018).…”