Host: Japan Society of Material Cycles and Waste Management
According to high toxicity, mercury applications have been reduced and it will raise environmentally safe disposal of unused mercury. Although environmental risk of mercury disposal, for example landfill, can be estimated using mercury environmental fate simulation, model parameters are reported to have various values with several orders of magnitude wide ranges. It is difficult to set appropriated value for each parameter in the simulation. In this study, model parameters were assumed to have lognormal Gaussian distributions. Their means and variations were estimated by maximum-likelihood method and parameter distributions were discretized again. Mercury exposure to human beings was calculated by mercury environmental fate simulation with all combinations of discretized parameter values. Calculated weekly mercury exposure ranged from 0.096 pg to 56 g and its median was 0.11 μg. This simulation suggests that mercury exposure will exceed tolerable intake with a probability of 50.3%. Robust evaluation of environmental risk of mercury landfill disposal considering large uncertainty of model parameters is possible using the simulation method tested in this study.
