Estimating Potential Life Cycle Releases of Engineered
Nanomaterials from Wastewater Treatment Plants
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Abstract
In the absence of experimental data,
a life cycle modeling approach
can be used to predict engineered nanomaterial (ENM) concentrations
in environmental media. Several such models have been created with
various geographic scopes. This study presents an environmental release
model that accounts for local differences in product consumption,
wastewater treatment levels, waste incineration, and biosolids management
and provides estimates of ENM release from wastewater treatment facilities
in New York City, London, and Shanghai. The results illustrate how
these local variations in model parameters contribute to differences
in predicted ENM concentration in wastewater effluent and biosolids
on a local level. Our analysis also takes a first step toward conducting
a local-level risk assessment by providing the approximate locations
and quantities of ENM discharge into aquatic systems. We find that
there is significant uncertainty in model parameters that leads to
a wide range of concentration estimates, yet we find that local variations
in model parameters predict ENM concentration estimates that are within
the same order of magnitude