Abstract
ABSTRACT
Quantitative assessments and comparisons are needed of the health risks posed by the available waste management alternatives in order to more conclusively establish the conditions under which incineration is more effective than other methods of treatment and disposal. The results of such comparisons may help the actual risks of hazardous waste incineration become better understood, and may assist in the siting of such facilities and in developing appropriate regulatory guidelines.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States has developed an integrated set of computer programs which uses facility source, meteorological, and population data to estimate annual average ground-level concentrations of stack emissions from hazardous waste incineration facilities. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has developed a generic health risk assessment methodology to evaluate the effects of such exposures. This paper describes how this information can be used to estimate the health risks of incinerator stack emissions on surrounding populations. Examples are given from a current study which uses stack emissions data from an incineration facility in West Germany to estimate what the effects of such emissions would be on a hypothetically exposed population in the United States.
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