Understanding the emissions and criteria pollutant formation from Volatile Chemical Products (VCPs)
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from adhesives, cleaning agents, personal care products, paints, pesticides, and other volatile chemical products (VCPs) result in human exposure in the vicinity of product use (Qin et al., 2021). Evaporated VOCs also react in the atmosphere to produce secondary pollutants including ozone and secondary organic aerosol (SOA), a contributor to PM2.5 (Qin et al., 2021). While VOCs from these sources have been part of the EPA National Emission Inventory (NEI) for decades, reductions in tailpipe VOC emissions mean that this source is of increasing interest for air quality in urban locations. Southern California is one such location that experiences ozone concentrations persistently in excess of the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) and where the EPA Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model largely underestimates the organic portion of PM2.5 in most air quality management applications. Current and ongoing work at EPA seeks to understand the magnitude of emissions from VCPs, and a newly developed framework, VCPy (Seltzer et al., 2021a), will be used in the 2020 NEI. Criteria pollutant formation pathways developed in work by Pennington et al. (2021) and examined by Seltzer et al. (2021b) will be incorporated in future CMAQ releases.
References
Pennington, E. A., Seltzer, K. M., Murphy, B. N., Qin, M., Seinfeld, J. H., and Pye, H. O. T.: Modeling secondary organic aerosol formation from volatile chemical products, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21, 18247-18261, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-18247-2021, 2021.
Qin, M., Murphy, B. N., Isaacs, K. K., McDonald, B. C., Lu, Q., McKeen, S. A., Koval, L., Robinson, A. L., Efstathiou, C., Allen, C., and Pye, H. O. T.: Criteria pollutant impacts of volatile chemical products informed by near-field modelling, Nat. Sustain., 4, 129-137, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00614-1, 2021.
Seltzer, K. M., Murphy, B. N., Pennington, E. A., Allen, C., Talgo, K., and Pye, H. O. T.: Volatile Chemical Product Enhancements to Criteria Pollutants in the United States, Environ. Sci. Technol., https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.1c04298, 2021b.
Seltzer, K. M., Pennington, E., Rao, V., Murphy, B. N., Strum, M., Isaacs, K. K., and Pye, H. O. T.: Reactive organic carbon emissions from volatile chemical products, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21, 5079-5100, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-5079-2021, 2021a.