Concawe workshop report “PAH integrated exposure modelling”

Report no. 8/17: This report summarises the discussions held during the “Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) integrated exposure modelling” 2-day workshop organized by the Flemish Institute for technological research (VITO) together with Concawe on 8 - 9th October 2015 at Concawe in Brussels.

Currently, Concawe aims to address the challenge of assessing the contribution of Petroleum Substances (PS) to aggregated PAH exposure. In this context, there is an opportunity to identify integrated multi-source, multi-route (MSMR) exposure model(s) suitable for characterising exposure to PAHs including those that may derive from PS. The ultimate goal is to have a reliable, validated, integrated source-to-receptor PAH exposure modelling tool capable of generating realistic predictions of PAH exposure, which enables the determination of the relative proportion of PAHs exposures over different routes and sources (and which also extends beyond petroleum sources). The overall aim of the workshop was to explore whether (and which of the) existing MSMR models meet the goal outlined above, and to identify databases (such as PAH monitoring in air, food and biomonitoring) that could be used to support and verify model predictions. The focus of the workshop was general population exposure modelling tools (including consumer exposure and indirect exposure via the environment).

This workshop report aims to reflect 1) the interaction and discussion between model developers and other workshop participants from a model user perspective, 2) the discussion on the potential bottlenecks and gaps when applying the models for PS scenarios, and 3) the way forward when using MSMR modelling in addressing Concawe’s challenge to assess the contribution of PS to aggregated PAH exposure.