Profiling of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) evolved from delayed storage of local household food wastes and its potential health risk / Siti Rohana Mohd Yatim

Food waste are easily degradable during storage, producing large quantities of VOCs that are harmful to human health. The thesis discussed VOCs from delayed storage of local household food waste and its potential health risk. Using a bioreactor, this study measured the production of VOCs at three parameters at four different temperature 20°C, 30°C, 40°C and 50°C for 21 days. The stud has the following objectives: 1. To develop a bioreactor for simulating real storage bin and to categories the composition of local household waste at selected residential area. 2. To investigate the emission of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) released during the decomposition of local household food waste by considering different abiotic factors such as temperature, refuse age, relative humidity, moisture contents, oxygen level and pH in a bioreactor using Thermal Desorption-Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (TD-GCMS). 3. To analyse the patterns of VOCs released during decomposition of waste using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) 4. To evaluate the potential health risk of waste collector to the VOCs arising from the extended storage of food waste using USEPA method. Overall, the significant association was found between VOCs emission and temperature, pH, relative humidity, oxygen level with the p-value<0.05. There is no significant different between levels. Determination of VOCs pattern using ANN, which utilized a multilayer feed forward back propagation with one hidden layer and seven hidden neurons, was found to be effective in predicting experimental data, thus saving time and cost for VOCs prediction. In Malaysia, lacking of study as well as lacking of awareness in both workers and municipality may impose detrimental health effect during waste collection. Therefore, this study provides health impact assessment with calculated hazard index between 0.1 and 1 for noncarcinogenic effects, which may cause long term issues among workers. Although carcinogenic risk posed by benzene and ethyl benzene was below the acceptable range, the concentration of these compounds is much higher than other types of VOCs. iv