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2010 Exponent Environmental Chemicals Webinar Series No. 2

PAHs: What You Need to Know and Why

This online seminar ("webinar") will focus on current environmental and health issues related to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the environment that may concern our clients.  We will address issues related to chemical analysis, apportionment, divisibility, and bioavailability of PAHs, as well as new health risk assessment approaches for PAH mixtures.

Why PAHs?  They are ubiquitous in the food we eat, the air we breathe, the soils we encounter, and the sediments in our waterways.  The story of PAHs in the environment is centuries old, because they are introduced through many natural mechanisms, such as fires.  However, there are also many human-caused sources of PAHs, including spills or petroleum and releases of various industrial wastes.  PAHs often drive estimated risks at contaminated sites as part of cleanups, are central to natural resource injury determinations for spills, and at many waste sites they are the subject of frequent toxic tort claims. The extreme variability among sites in the composition and bioavailability of PAHs make risk assessments highly uncertain, management decisions difficult, and liability particularly risky for defendants and potentially responsible parties.

Topics to be covered include:

• The number and types of PAHs that are typically measured in the environment, and how this variety evolved
• The importance of understanding the composition of PAHs in materials (e.g., oil, coal, tar, urban runoff)
• Case studies that illustrate best practices for using environmental forensics in establishing divisibility and apportioning responsibility
• The concept of bioavailability as part of the scientific assessment imperative.  Presenters will summarize new analytical methods that are being used to demonstrate that standard, default criteria are often overly conservative.
• EPA's new health risk assessment approach for PAH mixtures using relative potency factors (RPFs) to scale the toxicity of individual PAHs to that of one highly carcinogenic PAH.

We will discuss the far-reaching implications of all of these matters using case studies to illustrate these topics.

Speakers:

Paul D. Boehm, Ph.D.
Group Vice President, Environmental

Elizabeth L. Anderson, Ph.D., Fellow ATS
Group Vice President, Health

Susan B. Kane Driscoll
Managing Scientist

Click here to register

There is no cost to attend this webinar.