Comparison of methods for assessing human health and the environmental impact in early phases of chemical process development

Abstract

Abstract In chemical process design it is important to consider potential safety and environmental problems as early as possible. In this study a number of different methods for assessing human health or environmental impact are compared on a theoretical and a practical basis. Although developed for the same goal of assessing human health or environmental impact, these methods vary significantly in the number of effects considered and the way of processing data. However, the application to a case study resulted in similar assessments for most methods with regard to total impact while rather small deviations in the contribution of individual substances were found. Comparably large differences were found in particular for inorganic substances depending on the way methods consider non-degradability. The highest differences between assessment methods arise from the default assumptions in case of missing substance data. This fact shows the importance of using all available information, ranked according to its quality, in automated assessment. Furthermore, automatization speeds up process assessment and facilitates the comparison of different methods.