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Assignments
Project
> Making it Real
Visit the Toxic Release Inventory site at EPA (http://epa.gov/triexplorer) and find the data set for hazardous air pollutants (HAP) for your hometown community (you may have to search by county rather than zip code). If you who don't have a hometown in the US, you can pick a community that you might like to live in.
Report on the community you checked, and make a table with the 10 highest HAPs released on the basis of total air emissions (fugitive + point sources) in the latest year for which data are available and the total air emissions for that chemical. If your community has fewer than ten HAPs, provide a table with all the HAPs reported, or you can broaden the community by selecting county rather than zip code.
Then pick one of your "top ten" chemicals and discuss the likely sources for its emission into air, its route(s) of human exposure, and its known and/or suspected human health effects, including possible toxicodynamic effects. The IRIS (Integrated Risk Information System--viewable at http://www.epa.gov/iris) data set on the EPA website is a good place to begin for this information.
Be sure to reference all of your sources of information. Your discussion on the sources and health effects of your selected HAP should be about 2 pages single-spaced.
Finally, what RfD (Reference Dose) and/or RfC (Reference Concentration) has been established for exposure to your HAP, and what are the major uncertainties underlying its calculation? With regard to the above, provide justifications for why you selected something, and be sure the information is properly cited and free of grammatical and typographical errors.
Other Suggested Sources of Toxicity and Exposure Information
TOXNET http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/
ATSDR http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/
PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed
National Library Medicine http://www.toxtown.nlm.nih.gov
CDC http://www.cdc.gov/exposure report
This assignment is worth 25 points toward the final grade.
