Pollution characteristics and health risk assessment of phthalate esters in household dust in Chengdu, China

Abstract

The characteristics and health risks of 15 phthalate esters in household dust and the association with household attributes were investigated in Chengdu, China. The concentrations of total phthalate esters ranged from 87.9 to 3623 μg/g. Di (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) was the dominant compound of phthalate esters with a median of 151 μg/g. The statistical analysis result showed that household products and synthetic polymer emission were the main sources of phthalate esters. Smoking, cooking, keeping pets and the use of wooden floor and plastic wallpaper might increase the concentrations of phthalate esters in household dust, but opening windows frequently, and increasing the sweeping frequency might cause the decrease of phthalate esters in the indoor environment. The hazard indexes (HI) values of phthalate esters were all below 1, indicated that there are not non-carcinogenic of phthalate esters in household dust for the residents in Chengdu. However, the carcinogenic risk of DEHP was 2.54 × 10⁻⁶, implying that the carcinogenic risks via exposure to DEHP from Chengdu household dust were noticeable.

Keywords:

• Phthalate esters
• Chengdu
• household dust
• living habits
• health risk assessment

Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to the individuals who were actively involved in the dust collection effort for this project, namely Ms. Liu-Jun Chen, Miss Rui-Qi Zeng and Mr Hui Li.

Consent for publication

Themanuscript does not contain any individual person data.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The manuscript did not contain any reporting studies involving human data.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

Additional information

Funding

The research works of the above study were funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21507095) and Sichuan Provincial Youth Science and Technology Fund (No.2017JQ0035).