오염매체통합관리를 위한 유해화학물질의 다매체 환경기준 설정에 관한 연구

Abstract

Basically, the environment comprises multi-media including air, water and soil and so on. More numerous hazardous chemicals are increasingly emitted into the environment from various emission sources, which gives more complexity and difficulty in resolving the environmental problem. Since hazardous chemicals behave interactively in the multi-media environment by being transferred and/or partitioned from one medium to another, it requires so-called 'multi-media approach' to assess their fate in the environment and develop appropriate polity measures. Medium-specific environmental management of hazardous chemicals may result in the failure of environmental policies. Currently 'integrated environmental management' has become a new paradigm for the management of hazardous chemicals in many countries. Compared with other countries, Korea has less number of environmental quality criteria set up for the hazardous chemicals. Those existing criteria have rarely scientifically-defendable basis because they were not set by the results of risk assessment for the target chemicals. Furthermore, with respect to the purpose of integrated management, the existing criteria have never been examined for their consistency between them which are individually set up for each medium. In this study, 'coherence test' of medium-specific environmental quality objectives for the target chemical of benzo(a)pyrene was performed using EDCSeoul which is a multimedia fate model developed for the Seoul area in Korea. The results of coherence test showed a conclusion that the environmental criteria individually set up for each medium may result in inconsistency with others. For the successful implementation of multi-media environmental quality criteria, the followings were suggested; (1) environmental quality criteria for the priority chemicals need to be developed on the basis of risk assessment with multimedia approach, which criteria should be not only scientifically defendable but also socially and economically sound, (2) future efforts should be exerted on the development of various policy measures for emission control, monitoring strategy, and organizational rearrangement within the government for the integrated management of hazardous chemicals, (3) technological development projects were also suggested such as monitoring database, risk assessment technologies, and decision support system using the multimedia models. In oder to generalize the conclusions of this study which were drawn from the results performed for a single chemical of benzo(a)pyrene, it is required to give more efforts for developing a multimedia fate model which is versatile for various chemicals with less uncertainty.