Cleanup of contaminated soil -- Unreal risk assumptions: Contaminant degradation
- New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Ewing, NJ (United States)
Exposure assessments for development of risk-based soil cleanup standards or criteria assume that contaminant mass in soil is infinite and conservative (constant concentration). This assumption is not real for most organic chemicals. Contaminant mass is lost from soil and ground water when organic chemicals degrade. Factors to correct for chemical mass lost by degradation are derived from first-order kinetics for 85 organic chemicals commonly listed by USEPA and state agencies. Soil cleanup criteria, based on constant concentration, are then corrected for contaminant mass lost. For many chemicals, accounting for mass lost yields large correction factors to risk-based soil concentrations. For degradation in ground water and soil, correction factors range from greater than one to several orders of magnitude. The long exposure durations normally used in exposure assessments (25 to 70 years) result in large correction factors to standards even for carcinogenic chemicals with long half-lives. For the ground water pathway, a typical soil criterion for TCE of 1 mg/kg would be corrected to 11 mg/kg. For noncarcinogens, correcting for mass lost means that risk algorithms used to set soil cleanup requirements are inapplicable for many chemicals, especially for long periods of exposure.
- OSTI ID:
- 205337
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-951139--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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