Abstract
ABSTRACTUsing the European Union's Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) ecotoxicity data, this paper compares 3 different approaches to calculate final substance toxicity hazard values using the USEtox approach (chronic EC50 + acute EC50/2), using only acute EC50 equivalent data (EC50eq), and using only chronic no observed effect concentration equivalent (NOECeq) data. About 4008, 4853, and 5560 substance hazard values could be calculated for the USEtox model, acute only, and chronic only approaches, respectively. The USEtox model provides hazard values similar to the ones based on acute EC50 data only. Although there is a large amount of variability in the ratios, the data support acute EC50eq to chronic NOECeq ratios (calculated as geometric mean) of 10.64, 10.90, and 4.21 for fish, crustaceans, and algae respectively. Comparison of the calculated hazard values with the criteria used by the EU chemical Classification, Labelling, and Packaging regulation (CLP) shows the USEtox model underestimates the number of compounds categorized as very toxic to aquatic life and/or having long‐lasting effects. In contrast, use of the chronic NOEC data shows a good agreement with CLP. It is therefore proposed that chronic NOECeq are used to derive substance hazard values to be used in the EU Environmental Footprint. Due to poor data availability for some chemicals, the uncertainty of the final hazard values is expected to be high. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2019;15:796–807. © 2019 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).
Highlights
In April 2013, the European Commission (EC) published a recommendation on the use of a common method to measure and communicate the life cycle environmental performance of products and organizations (EC 2013), the Environmental Footprint (EU‐EF)
The pooling of endpoints is used to ensure that a toxicity value is available for as many substances as possible. This pooling gives a fair indication of the overall acute and chronic toxicity of substances using all toxicity information available for each specific substance, provided the data meet certain quality criteria (Saouter et al 2019). Note that this approach is not recommended in the chemical safety assessments utilized in REACH, in view of the much larger data availability reduction that follows from that approach, related to the large tradeoffs of data reduction on the number and “stability” of compound sensitivity distribution (SSD)
The main objective of the present work was to demonstrate the feasibility of using the REACH ecotoxicity database to derive toxicity hazard values for a large number of substances in the context of EU‐EF method
Summary
In April 2013, the European Commission (EC) published a recommendation on the use of a common method to measure and communicate the life cycle environmental performance of products and organizations (EC 2013), the Environmental Footprint (EU‐EF). In November 2013, the EC started a 4‐y pilot exercise with industries, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and academia to test the application of the EU‐EF method on 25 products (e.g., batteries, paints, water supply pipes, detergents). The EU‐EF considers 16 different impact categories: climate change; ozone depletion; freshwater ecotoxicity; human toxicity, cancer; human toxicity, noncancer; particulate matter; ionizing radiation; photochemical ozone formation; acidification; terrestrial eutrophication; freshwater eutrophication; marine eutrophication; resource depletion, water; resource depletion, mineral and metals; resource depletion, fossil; and land use. The model initially recommended by the EC to calculate the impact of chemical was USEtox (Hauschild et al 2008; Henderson et al 2011; Fantke et al 2017). The source of the input data including physicochemical parameters as well as ecotoxicity values were
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