**5. Conclusion**

The current study is the first one in Tunisia and Sfax city that aimed to assess the occupational exposure and health risks of PCE and TCE in the dry cleaning industry.

The exposure assessment was achieved by means of the quantification of airborne concentrations of the chlorinated solvents via active air monitoring and their chemical analyses.

Our results revealed and responded to many interrogations and suspicions about the qualitative and quantitative exposure conditions and consequently the health status of dry cleaning workers in Sfax. In fact, all facilities are not following the standardized prevention and industrial hygiene measures. Moreover, they have declared to exclusively work with PCE products; however, TCE was detected in all facilities, and its concentrations were high and concerning.

Due to the inhalation exposure levels, many adverse effects are probably threatening the occupationally exposed population and even the general one, because of the location of all facilities in residential settings.

Among the threshold effects, we can distinguish high risks of neurological, nephrotoxic, developmental, and immune effects.

As for the carcinogenic effects, considerably high cancer risks were noticed if the lifetime exposure to these solvents would have the current average levels. Actually, 17 additional cases of hematologic, liver, and kidney cancers are expected to take place in population of 100 people.

Taking this into account, PCE and TCE air concentrations have to be reduced. Thus, some corrective measures were suggested in order to improve the working conditions.

We believe that the implementation of this study is very significant, at the Tunisian level, for better understanding of the dry cleaning industrial sector and for the improvement of future risk assessment studies in this field. Indeed, this pilot study provides the first occupational exposure data to TCE and PCE emissions from randomly selected dry cleaning facilities in Sfax city.
