Human health risk assessment: models for predicting the effective exposure duration of on-site receptors exposed to contaminated groundwater

Clean-up of contaminated sites is usually based on a risk-based approach for the definition of the remediation goals, which relies on the well known ASTM-RBCA standard procedure. In this procedure, migration of contaminants is described through simple analytical models and the source contaminants’ concentration is supposed to be constant throughout the entire exposure period, i.e. 25–30 years. The latter assumption may often result over-protective of human health, leading to unrealistically low remediation goals. The aim of this work is to propose an alternative model taking in account the source depletion, while keeping the original simplicity and analytical form of the ASTM-RBCA approach. The results obtained by the application of this model are compared with those provided by the traditional ASTM-RBCA approach, by a model based on the source depletion algorithm of the RBCA ToolKit software and by a numerical model, allowing to assess its feasibility for inclusion in risk analysis procedures. The results discussed in this work are limited to on-site exposure to contaminated water by ingestion, but the approach proposed can be extended to other exposure pathways.