Some chemical substances, for example some fragrances and preservatives, are used in many consumer products. Examples are personal care products (e.g. shampoo, body lotion, soap), household cleaning products and do-it-yourself products. So, in one single day a person can be exposed to these substances via multiple products. To estimate the total daily exposure of a person, the exposures from all products used on that day need to be summed. For this purpose the Probabilistic Aggregate Consumer Exposure Model (PACEM) has been developed by RIVM, in cooperation with ETH Zürich and Radboud University of Nijmegen. This work has been funded by the Ministry of Public Health, Welfare and Sports and by the CEFIC Long Range Initiative program.
The model is based on realistic product usage information obtained from surveys. Currently, information on the usage (frequency and amount) of personal care products and household cleaning products in various European countries is included.
PACEM has been applied and tested for a number of substances. These were:
- diethyl phthalate (Delmaar et al. 2014)
- parabens (Gosens et al. 2014)
- decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (D5, Dudzina et al. 2015)
- geraniol (Nijkamp et al. 2015; Jongeneel et al. 2018)
- isothiazolinones (Ezendam et al (2018); Garcia-Hidalgo et al. 2018)
- bisphenols (Karrer et al. 2019)
In 2021, in a project funded by the Long Range Science Strategy (LRSS) program of Cosmetics Europe, the PACEM model as described in (Delmaar et al., 2018) has been made available in a web tool: PACEMweb
In 2024 version 1.1 of PACEM has been released. Release 1.1 features additional functions to describe parameter input distributions, including trapezoidal, truncated normal and truncated lognormal functions. Additionally, PACEM 1.1 now includes a method to evaluate the impact of specific products on the total exposure distribution, allowing a user to evaluate options for risk management by restricting use of the substance in high-impact products.
Finally, a method has been implemented to make PACEM simulations more efficient in terms of use of system resources. This adaptation may have a small impact on the reproducibility of previously conducted simulations. Re-running stored simulations may yield slightly different outcomes, even when using the same random seed.
For questions or comments you can contact us at pacemweb@rivm.nl.