Use of Risk Assessment in Evaluating Remediation of PCBs,
Abstract
Risk assessment is often used to evaluated the need for, and the potential effectiveness of, remediation of chemical contamination. Estimating the potential residual risk from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) may involve more complex issues than many other chemicals; the presence of more decision points in a risk assessment results in more potential for variation among the analyses performed by different people. For example, the toxicity of PCBs is known to vary with composition, but methods for estimating the toxicity of these complex mixtures for different toxicity endpoints are controversial. Changes in composition of the mixture with time, medium, and place of exposure may also significantly alter the toxicity and concomitant risk. In addition, some of the more interesting potential routes of exposure (e.g., contact with contaminated surface) may be estimated using a variety of models and assumptions, resulting in substantially different assessments of exposure and risk. Although various complex factors should be considered in the risk assessment, simple models should also be used to estimate an upper bound on risk to ensure that a concatenation of conservative assumptions do not result in impossible situations (e.g., predicting exposure to more PCBs by one or several routes than were available for the exposure that was estimated)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1993
- Accession Number
- ADP008712
Entities
People
- Resha M. Putzrath