Total Suspended Particulate from mobile sources in an Italian opencast quarry: A proposal to improve US EPA ISC3 model

In Italy, according to the Goverment Decree no 152/2006, both air quality standards and quantification of emission rate from pollutant sources, are required to estabilish industrial activities. Among these, quarrying activities, as for their characteristics, tend to release huge amount of dust and the most common pollutant is represented by Total Suspended Particulate (TSP). The Industrial Source Complex (ISC3) model, created by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA), is the most diffused model for predicting dispersion of pollutants from industrial facilities and it can be used also in predicting TSP concentration due to opencast quarrying activities. Moreover it defines emission factors and prediction type equations for many quarry dust sources but past studies, referred only to PM10 fraction, showed that this model tends to over predict dust concentration because it does not allow to model mobile source in the proper way such as haul trucks that many studies defined to represent an important fraction of the amount of dust from these activities. So in recent years, an evolution of the US EPA ISC3 model called DCP (Dynamic Component Program) was realized and tested in US opencast quarries. In the present investigation the DCP model, set for PM10 dispersion from mobile sources, is developed for TSP fraction and tested according to field studies and samples realized in an Italian opencast quarry extracting basalt. Moreover the most common emission factors from haul trucks are tested (it is important to remember that because of site specific characteristics emission factors developed for one site may not fit correctly another one) and once the amount of dust from mobile sources is defined, the impact on air quality is assessed according to the developed DCP model in order to allow controls required by Italian Law. Field studies showed that the DCP model, as for TSP fraction, determined an improvement from 15 to 45 per cent over the ISC3 model. © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group.