Source appointment and health risk assessment for atmospheric carbonyls in hot tropical city, Vietnam

The aim of this study is to assess the spatiotemporal variation, sources, and health impacts of the carbonyl compounds (carbonyls) in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), the third-most populous city in Southeast Asia. Sampling was conducted according to the US.EPA Method TO-11A, from 2012 to 2016 in both the dry and the rainy seasons at twelve sites. The result shows that the carbonyl mixing ratios are high when compared to typical cities. Formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and acetone are the most abundant carbonyls together accounting for 89% of the measured carbonyls. The carbonyl mixing ratio in rainy (46.0 ± 32.2 ppb) is about twofold higher than that in dry (23.7 ± 10.3 ppb). An inverse distance weighting method was adopted to map the spatial distribution of carbonyls across the city. The result shows that the carbonyl levels tended to be high in the city center. Three carbonyl sources are resolved by the PCA/APCS method: industrial sources and solvent usage (54%), vehicle exhausts (24%), cooking emissions (11%). Both lifetime cancer risk (LCR) and non-cancer hazard index (HIs) were calculated to estimate the health impacts on the community due to inhalation exposure to current carbonyl levels. The LCR values vary from 5.31 × 10⁻⁶ to 5.75 × 10⁻⁵ for formaldehyde higher than those of 6.61 × 10⁻⁷ to 1.36 × 10⁻⁵ for acetaldehyde, which mostly exceeded the US.EPA recommendation for five age groups. The hazard quotient values are 12.0 to 68.4 for acrolein, 0.44 to 2.84 for acetaldehyde, 0.55 to 1.85 for formaldehyde, and 0.13 to 0.89 for propionaldehyde.