ABSTRACT
The environmental fate of pollutants has been an important issue at least as early as the 1960s, when environmentalists began to raise public consciousness that chemicals may ultimately travel far from their original sources. Risk management is “the process of weighing policy alternatives and selecting the most appropriate regulatory action, integrating the results of risk assessment with engineering data and with social, economic, and political concerns to reach a decision.” Exposure assessment must then be used as a predictive tool in estimating potential future exposures. It is this predictive nature of exposure assessment which relies heavily on models, including environmental fate models. Exposure assessment is the qualitative or quantitative determination/estimation of the magnitude, frequency, duration, and route of exposure, and often also describes the resultant internal dose. Models are an important part of a much larger process of risk assessment and risk management, and it is this process that the agency decisionmakers use to help them make regulatory decisions.
