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Effectiveness of road dust suppressants: insights from particulate matter-related health damage

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Abstract

Although dust suppressants are widely applied to control road dust pollution, a consensus on their effectiveness has not been reached. To evaluate the effectiveness of dust suppressants (a calcium–magnesium complex) from health risks and health damage, spraying and sampling activities were conducted at four sites in Beijing. Using inhalation risk model and health damage assessment, health risks of PMx for three sensitive occupational groups were calculated and converted to life and economic loss. Results revealed that dust suppressants can indeed mitigate PM pollution and its accompanying health risks and health damage in road dust, but at a limited efficiency. By spraying dust suppressants, the total PM-related life loss reduced by 1.60E−02 years and 2.50E−04 years in urban and suburban areas on average, and the total willingness to pay (WTP) values decreased by 120 and 50 US$ for PM2.5 and PM10, indicating a more considerable environmental gain if dust suppressants were sprayed in additional regions when necessary. Overall, our study demonstrated that the effectiveness of dust suppressants cannot be pictured only by the variations of pollutant concentrations, and indicators with practice and economic value should be more useful for traffic-related pollution management.

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Acknowledgements

The work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 52074302, 51674268).

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  1. School of Emergency Management and Safety Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology - Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

    Boling Zhang, Yiran Wang, Xu Zhao, Lanxin Cao & Ruipeng Tong

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4, 5, 6, 7 and Figs. 9 and 10.

Fig. 9
figure 9

Spraying process of our experiment

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Fig. 10
figure 10

Test setup on sampling sites

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Table 4 Road and traffic conditions of the sampling sites
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Table 5 Specific weather conditions during monitoring
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Table 6 Description of the three occupational exposure groups
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Table 7 Description of the three occupational exposure groups
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Zhang, B., Wang, Y., Zhao, X. et al. Effectiveness of road dust suppressants: insights from particulate matter-related health damage. Environ Geochem Health 43, 4139–4162 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-021-00866-6

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