Lisa Pizzol

Regional risk assessment for contaminated sites Part 2: Ranking of potentially contaminated sites

Environmental risks are traditionally assessed and presented in non spatial ways although the heterogeneity of the contaminants spatial distributions, the spatial positions and relations between receptors and stressors, as well as the spatial distribution of the variables involved in the risk assessment, strongly influence exposure estimations and hence risks. Taking into account spatial variability is increasingly being recognized as a further and essential step in sound exposure and risk assessment. To address this issue an innovative methodology which integrates spatial analysis and a relative risk approach was developed. The purpose of this methodology is to prioritize sites at regional scale where a preliminary site investigation may be required. The methodology aimed at supporting the inventory of contaminated sites was implemented within the spatial decision support sYstem for Regional rIsk Assessment of DEgraded land, SYRIADE, and was applied to the case-study of the Upper Silesia region (Poland). The developed methodology and tool are both flexible and easy to adapt to different regional contexts, allowing the user to introduce the regional relevant parameters identified on the basis of user expertise and regional data availability. Moreover, the used GIS functionalities, integrated with mathematical approaches, allow to take into consideration, all at once, the multiplicity of sources and impacted receptors within the region of concern, to assess the risks posed by all contaminated sites in the region and, finally, to provide a risk-based ranking of the potentially contaminated sites.

Regional risk assessment approaches to land planning for industrial polluted areas in China: The Hulunbeier region case study

The rapid industrial development and urbanization processes that occurred in China over the past 30years has increased dramatically the consumption of natural resources and raw materials, thus exacerbating the human pressure on environmental ecosystems. In result, large scale environmental pollution of soil, natural waters and urban air were recorded. The development of effective industrial planning to support regional sustainable economy development has become an issue of serious concern for local authorities which need to select safe sites for new industrial settlements (i.e. industrial plants) according to assessment approaches considering cumulative impacts, synergistic pollution effects and risks of accidental releases. In order to support decision makers in the development of efficient and effective regional land-use plans encompassing the identification of suitable areas for new industrial settlements and areas in need of intervention measures, this study provides a spatial regional risk assessment methodology which integrates relative risk assessment (RRA) and socio-economic assessment (SEA) and makes use of spatial analysis (GIS) methodologies and multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques. The proposed methodology was applied to the Chinese region of Hulunbeier which is located in eastern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, adjacent to the Republic of Mongolia. The application results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in the identification of the most hazardous and risky industrial settlements, the most vulnerable regional receptors and the regional districts which resulted to be the most relevant for intervention measures since they are characterized by high regional risk and excellent socio-economic development conditions.

Actor networks and the construction of applicable knowledge: the case of the Timbre Brownfield Prioritization Tool

This article deals with experiences acquired during the process of developing the Timbre Brownfield Prioritization Tool (TBPT). Developing a decision support tool that takes into account the expectations and experiences of its potential users is similar to creating applicable knowledge by the joint action of scientists and heterogeneous actors. Actor network theory is used to explore the construction of this form of applicable knowledge as a process of actor network creation. Following the French sociologist Callon, networks are seen to be initiated and carried out by a group of scientists (tool developers) via four moments of translation, called problematization, interessement, enrolment and mobilization. Each step in the construction of the TBPT—from the initial research question to the final model—can be linked in retrospect to changing configurations of actor networks. Based on the experiences of the tool developers in the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany and Romania, we illustrate how these configurations varied across space and time. This contribution emphasizes the ability to correlate gains in knowledge with the more visible changes in the scope of actor networks in order to highlight achievements but also limitations in acquiring applicable knowledge.

Comparison of risk-based decision-support systems for brownfield site rehabilitation: DESYRE and SADA applied to a Romanian case study.

Brownfield rehabilitation is an essential step for sustainable land-use planning and management in the European Union. In brownfield regeneration processes, the legacy contamination plays a significant role, firstly because of the persistent contaminants in soil or groundwater which extends the existing hazards and risks well into the future; and secondly, problems from historical contamination are often more difficult to manage than contamination caused by new activities. Due to the complexity associated with the management of brownfield site rehabilitation, Decision Support Systems (DSSs) have been developed to support problem holders and stakeholders in the decision-making process encompassing all phases of the rehabilitation. This paper presents a comparative study between two DSSs, namely SADA (Spatial Analysis and Decision Assistance) and DESYRE (Decision Support System for the Requalification of Contaminated Sites), with the main objective of showing the benefits of using DSSs to introduce and process data and then to disseminate results to different stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. For this purpose, a former car manufacturing plant located in the Brasov area, Central Romania, contaminated chiefly by heavy metals and total petroleum hydrocarbons, has been selected as a case study to apply the two examined DSSs. Major results presented here concern the analysis of the functionalities of the two DSSs in order to identify similarities, differences and complementarities and, thus, to provide an indication of the most suitable integration options.

A Spatial Decision Support System for the Risk-Based Management of Contaminated Sites: The DESYRE DSS

A GIS-based Decision Support System (DSS) called DESYRE (Decision Support sYstem for the REqualification of contaminated sites) was developed in order to address the integrated management and remediation of contaminated megasites. The DESYRE DSS supports decision makers during the main phases of a remediation process, i.e. analysis of social and economic benefits and constraints, site characterization, risk assessment, selection of best available technologies, creation of sets of technologies to be applied, analysis of residual risk and comparison of different remediation scenarios. Within the DESYRE DSS these functionalities were implemented in six interconnected modules. In the characterization module, chemical and hydrogeological data are organized in a relational database in order to support the definition of the conceptual model of the site and to provide information regarding contaminant distribution and transport through the different environmental media. Georeferenced information system tools are used for handling spatial data. The socio-economic module addresses the socio-economical constraints though a Fuzzy Logic analysis, in order to provide decision makers with a tool that compares the different land use options outlining possible scenarios linked to alternative uses of the considered site, on the basis of socio-economic considerations and local characteristics. In the pre-remediation phase, an original risk assessment methodology (risk assessment module) allows the evaluation and estimation of the spatial distribution of risks posed by contaminants in soil and groundwater, providing a risk-based zoning of the site in support of the definition of the remediation technologies plan. The latter phase is performed in the technology assessment module, where a selection of suitable technologies and the creation of different technology sets are carried out by experts supported by Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis tools. The selection takes into account both technical features and requirements of available technologies, as well as site-specific environmental conditions of the site of concern, such as chemical contamination levels and remediation objectives. A simulation of the selected technologies application is performed in the post-remediation risk assessment (residual risk assessment module) in order to provide residual risk maps with related uncertainty maps. Finally, the decision module provides a methodology for the description and comparison of alternative remediation scenarios by defining a set of aggregated indices. In this chapter, the structure and the functionalities of the software DESYRE are presented. The application of the whole system to a case study gives an explanation of the flow of information within the system and the presentation of the outputs of all the above mentioned modules.

Probabilistic approach for assessing infants' health risks due to ingestion of nanoscale silver released from consumer products

Silver nanoparticles (n-Ag) are widely used in consumer products and many medical applications because of their unique antibacterial properties. Their use is raising concern about potential human exposures and health effects. Therefore, it is informative to assess the potential human health risks of n-Ag in order to ensure that nanotechnology-based consumer products are deployed in a safe and sustainable way. Even though toxicity studies clearly show the potential hazard of n-Ag, there have been few attempts to integrate hazard and exposure assessments to evaluate risks. The underlying reason for this is the difficulty in characterizing exposure and the lack of toxicity studies essential for human health risk assessment (HHRA). Such data gaps introduce significant uncertainty into the risk assessment process. This study uses probabilistic methods to assess the relative uncertainty and potential risks of n-Ag exposure to infants. In this paper, we estimate the risks for infants potentially exposed to n-Ag through drinking juice or milk from sippy cups or licking baby blankets containing n-Ag. We explicitly evaluate uncertainty and variability contained in available dose-response and exposure data in order to make the risk characterization process transparent. Our results showed that individual margin of exposures for oral exposure to sippy cups and baby blankets containing n-Ag exhibited minimal risk.

Quantitative human health risk assessment along the lifecycle of nano-scale copper-based wood preservatives.

Abstract The use of nano-scale copper oxide (CuO) and basic copper carbonate (Cu2(OH)2CO3) in both ionic and micronized wood preservatives has raised concerns about the potential of these substances to cause adverse humans health effects. To address these concerns, we performed quantitative (probabilistic) human health risk assessment (HHRA) along the lifecycles of these formulations used in antibacterial and antifungal wood coatings and impregnations by means of the EU FP7 SUN project’s Decision Support System (SUNDS, www.sunds.gd). The results from the risk analysis revealed inhalation risks from CuO in exposure scenarios involving workers handling dry powders and performing sanding operations as well as potential ingestion risks for children exposed to nano Cu2(OH)2CO3 in a scenario involving hand-to-mouth transfer of the substance released from impregnated wood. There are, however, substantial uncertainties in these results, so some of the identified risks may stem from the safety margin of extrapolation to fill data gaps and might be resolved by additional testing. Our stochastic approach successfully communicated the contribution of different sources of uncertainty in the risk assessment. The main source of uncertainty was the extrapolation from short to long-term exposure, which was necessary due to the lack of (sub)chronic in vivo studies with CuO and Cu2(OH)2CO3. Considerable uncertainties also stemmed from the use of default inter- and intra-species extrapolation factors.