Abstract
Methyl siloxanes are becoming increasingly prevalent in the environment because of their extensive use in various consumer products. Little is known about the distribution of these chemicals around factories or their presence in road dust. We conducted a survey of four cyclic (D3–D6) and 13 linear (L4–L16) siloxanes in road dusts around a manufacturing site and found a total siloxane concentration range of 47.3–3.16 × 103 ng/g (median 372). The predominant siloxanes in the road dust samples were D3, D4, D5, and D6, with median contributions of 65.3%, 17.9%, 6.36%, and 2.16% of the total siloxane concentrations, respectively. Our reported concentrations were comparable to those found in household dusts in previous studies. No high concentrations of siloxanes were observed in the road dust samples from the manufacturing site, which suggests that siloxanes in outdoor dusts are likely affected by many factors. Under a high exposure scenario, the daily intakes of total siloxanes via road dust ingestion at the 95th percentile were 2.13 and 0.313 ng/kg-bw/day for children and adults, respectively. Although the estimated exposure to siloxanes in outdoor dust for humans was low, more studies on the distributions and risks of siloxanes released from manufacturing sites are needed.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 41701554, 41877467) and the National Key R&D Program of China (grant number 2018YFC1900104). We thank Gabrielle David, PhD, from Liwen Bianji, Edanz Editing China (www.liwenbianji.cn/ac), for editing the English text of a draft of this manuscript.
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Jiali Cheng: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, resources, formal analysis, data curation, visualization, funding acquisition, writing—original draft. Zhenwu Tang: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, project administration, funding acquisition, writing—review and editing. Yan Ma: investigation, resources. Hongmin Yin: investigation. Tong Meng: investigation. Jiazheng Sun: investigation.
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Cheng, J., Tang, Z., Ma, Y. et al. Methyl siloxanes in road dust from a large silicone manufacturing site in China: implications of human exposure. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 16054–16064 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11773-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11773-1