Quantitative assessment of environmental exposure of delivery men in Wuhan

Abstract

The take out industry is rapidly developing in China, but the environmental exposure of delivery men is neglected. “Ele.Me,” an online food ordering platform, is one of the two largest catering online-to-offline platforms in China. From January 2018 to April 2018, data from 16,528 take out shops in Wuhan were crawled by using Python. The data included store name, average delivery time, delivery price, region, and store type. With the use of Baidu map’s API batch reverse address resolution, the map locations of the take out shops were identified. Network service area was utilized to obtain the activity space of delivery men along the Wuhan traffic road network. Combined with the data on sulfur dioxide (SO₂), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), carbon monoxide (CO), ozone (O₃), PM2.5, PM10, and noise provided by the Wuhan Environmental Protection Bureau, the spatial interpolation, regional analysis, superposition analysis, and other geographic information system spatial analysis methods were used to study the air and noise pollution within the activity space of delivery men in various take out shops. Results revealed the unbalanced environment faced by Wuhan delivery men. The exposure to NO₂, CO, and PM2.5 was mainly concentrated in the central city, whereas the exposure to SO₂, O₃, and PM10 was mainly noted far from the city. Noise pollution was mainly observed in the districts of Hannan, Caidian, and Dongxihu; and the most serious pollution was recorded in Shamao Street. The weighted comprehensive pollution index model was used to calculate the contribution weight of each evaluation factor to obtain the results of environmental exposure to air pollution. The influence of noise was further considered to obtain the consequences of comprehensive environmental exposure to pollution. The highly polluted regions were those in the central part of the city. Pollution was mainly concentrated in the third loop, whereas Zhucheng Street in the Xinzhou District provided the best environment. The results of this study can serve as a reference for the physical health risk assessment of delivery men.

Keywords:

• Activity space
• delivery men
• environmental exposure
• GIS

Authors’ contributions

Conceptualization, Nai Yang; Formal analysis, Rong Fu; Funding acquisition, Nai Yang; Investigation, Hongbo Liu; Methodology, Rong Fu; Project administration, Nai Yang; Supervision, Yi Chao; Validation, Xiaoya Ma; Writing – review & editing, Rong Fu.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the State Scholarship Fund from the China Scholarship Council (CSC), grant number 201706415027, the Fundamental Research Founds for National University, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), grant number G1323541712, the Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Urban Land Resources Monitoring and Simulation, Ministry of Land and Resources, grant number KF-2018-03-033, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41701537).