A national inventory of historical dioxin air emissions sources in France

Dioxins, are persistent organic pollutants with endocrine disrupting properties and are classified as human carcinogens. To better characterise historical atmospheric dioxin exposure in epidemiological studies, we performed a comprehensive inventory of dioxin-emitting sources between 1990 and 2008, in France, at a fine spatial resolution, according to the methodology of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Toolkit. Overall, we identified 2620 distinct dioxin-emitting sources over the French territory. The majority of the sources were geolocated either at the stack (43%) or at the building (27%). The final database contains the technical characteristics and activity rates for each source over the study period. These data served to estimate total annual dioxin emissions (g-TEQ/year). We compared our estimates with both measurements and emissions inventories (at departmental and national level). The discrepancies in the comparisons between the Toolkit estimates, the dioxin measurements available, and inventories remained within the uncertainty range of the UNEP Toolkit estimates. The differences observed were due to a general lack of data and to the large number of small incinerators with large dioxin emissions inventoried. Due to better access to relevant data and a decrease in emissions, the UNEP Toolkit estimates get closer to measurements and estimates of others inventories for more recent years. We created the first database containing the annual atmospheric dioxin emissions for a large number of emission sources at the facility scale for an entire country. This database was used to assess exposure to dioxins in epidemiological studies.