Evaluation of Occupational Exposure Risk for Employees Working in Dynamic Olfactometry: Focus On Non-Carcinogenic Effects Correlated with Exposure to Landfill Emissions

Elisa Polvara,Laura Capelli,Selena Sironi,Baharak Essna Ashari

doi:10.3390/atmos12101325

Abstract

This work aims to evaluate the non-carcinogenic health effects related to landfill odor emissions, therefore focusing on workers involved in dynamic olfactometry. Currently, the most common technique to quantify odor emissions is dynamic olfactometry, a sensorial analysis involving human assessors. During the analysis, assessors are directly exposed, at increasing concentrations, to odor samples, and thus to the hazardous pollutants contained therein. This entails the need to estimate the associated exposure risk to guarantee examiners’ safety. Therefore, this paper evaluates the exposure risk for olfactometric examiners to establish the minimum dilution level to be adopted during the analysis of landfills’ odorous samples to guarantee panelists’ safety. For this purpose, an extensive literature review regarding the pollutants emitted by landfill odor sources was conducted, comparing compounds’ chemical concentrations and threshold limit values (TLVs) to calculate the Hazard Index (HI) and thus establish a minimum dilution value. The data collected indicate that a non-negligible non-carcinogenic risk exists for all landfill emissions considered. However, from the data considered, the minimum dilution factor to be adopted is lower than the typical odor concentration observed for these sources. Therefore, the olfactometric analysis of landfill samples can be generally conducted in safe conditions.

Highlights

In recent decades, odor pollution related to waste treatment and disposal facilities has become an ever-growing challenge [1,2,3]
Landfills represent one of the most important industrial sources of odor pollution, and often, landfill emissions are collected to be analyzed by dynamic olfactometry
These emissions may contain pollutants potentially dangerous for human assessors involved in this analysis, and for this reason, it is important to investigate the exposure risk for these workers

Summary

Introduction

Odor pollution related to waste treatment and disposal facilities has become an ever-growing challenge [1,2,3]. Odorous emissions from landfills are mainly related to the decomposition of the organic matter in the disposed wastes [5,6,7,8]. These odor emissions often cause concerns related to their potential effects on human health and the environment [1,2,9,10]. For these reasons, odor emissions are currently regulated in multiple countries [11,12,13,14], and different specific techniques for odor control and monitoring have been developed. Dynamic olfactometry is a sensorial analysis, which is standardized at the European level by the EN 13725:2003 [17]

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Methods

Conclusion