Source Analysis and Environmental Health Risk Assessment of VOCs in Furniture Manufacturing

Abstract

Regarding furniture manufacturing, scholars have only studied the sources of VOCs in the spraying process, yet the main concern is the release of VOCs after the completion of the manufacturing process and its impact on indoor air quality. Therefore, in this study, the sources of VOCs for the entire process of furniture manufacturing were explored and probabilistic risk models were improved. Then, the carcinogenicity and non-carcinogenic health risks to workers at nine workstations in a furniture factory were evaluated via a Monte Carlo simulation method, and the sensitivity of each exposure parameter was analyzed. The results are as follows. The various types of paints, diluents, and curing agents used in the process of spraying primer paint and spraying surface paint release VOCs, such as benzene, toluene, xylene, styrene, butanone, cyclohexanone, butyl acetate, and ethyl acetate. The glue used in the leather pasting process, the glue process, and the viscose process generates VOCs, such as dichloromethane and ethyl acetate, and the paint remover used in the cleaning process emits dichloromethane. The carcinogenic risk at each station was more than 10-6. For benzene exposure, the probability of exceeding 10-6 was greater than 95% for all stations, excluding SWB, SWP, and CWP. The carcinogenicrisk of workers exposed to benzene was the highest at SWS, at 3.07×10-6±1.73×10-6, and the carcinogenicrisk of workers exposed to dichloromethane was the greatest at SWL, with a value of 5.14×10-6±2.70×10-6. The only non-carcinogenicrisk greater than 1 was to SWS workers. The parameters that had the greatest impact on the carcinogenic risk assessment were exposure day (ED), concentration (C), exposure time (ET), and exposure frequency (EF). In the non-carcinogenic risk assessment, the most influential variables were ED, ET, and EF. In addition, concentration also had a significant impact on the evaluation results.