Abstract
The area of Naples and Campania region, in Italy, has been experiencing the dramatic consequences of diffuse open burning of illegal waste, resulting in possible threats to human health. The need of evaluating a risk index of open burning rises from this emergency where it is important quantify the risk to support local stakeholder to intervene timely and effectively order and to prioritize the interventions. Nevertheless, open burning phenomenon is still uncontrolled all over the world, and implies not only impacts on health at local level but emission of pollutants in the atmosphere. A deep understanding can support policy makers in order to prevent risky behaviours and to mitigate the severity of their occurrences. The risk model related to open burning is still an open issue, and the attempt to model the probability of its occurrence is completely new. This paper proposes a model for the evaluation of risk of illegal waste open burning in Campania enabling the identification of the priority of intervention in order to optimize the available resources. In detail, it defines a layered and seamless approach to evaluate the related impact at different levels of accuracy leveraging on reference guidelines.
Highlights
Risks related to emissions of air contaminants are relevant for human health, those from open burnings currently are still uncontrolled
This paper proposes a model for the evaluation of risk of illegal waste open burning in Campania
There are guidelines to evaluate the impact in terms of toxicity and the exposure, but they leave the quantification of the initial concentration of contaminants to the single research initiative, implying different approaches not allowing a sound comparison among the different obtained risk indexes
Summary
Risks related to emissions of air contaminants are relevant for human health, those from open burnings currently are still uncontrolled. The World Bank considers it as an uncontrolled Global Health disaster, estimating that the 41% of global waste is burned openly, even higher in poor or emergent countries, as reported, obtained from [1] It releases significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Such a model, integrated in an appropriate decision support system, enables the definition of the priority of intervention in order to optimize the available resources. It defines a layered approach to evaluate the related impact at different levels of accuracy and of available data, leveraging on reference guidelines and literature in order to evaluate toxicity and exposure factors in a seamless framework It provides some preliminary considerations on the evaluation of the probability in terms of identified influence factors. Most researches have focused on the analysis of air pollutants such as dioxins, carcinogenic elements, carbon monoxide and particulate matters. , A good summary of all relevant references and studies on emission factors is provided in [2] and reported in Fig. 2 [3, 4]
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