Risk Assessments of Exposure to Airborne Volatile Organic Compounds in Gumi Industrial Complex Area, Korea

Abstract

This paper carried out the lifetime risk assessment of exposure to airborne Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in environmental atmosphere in one Korean industrial city-Gumi based on the measured concentrations of VOCs at five representative outdoor monitoring sites. According to the measured VOCs concentration, toluene, trichloroethylene and dichloromethane are three main VOCs in Gumi. The carcinogenic risks for each of the carcinogenic VOCs in all five designated sites are more than the benchmark concentration (1.0E-6). The predominant risks in industrial areas are chloroform, benzene and trichloroethylene. And the predominant risks in other sites are benzene and chloroform and their proportions to cancer risk are not less than 90%. Based the analysis, effectively decreasing the emission of chloroform, benzene, Trichloroethylene and 1,2-dichloropropane will rapidly reduce the cancer risks in Gumi.