Abstract
For efficient management of chemicals, it is necessary to preferentially select hazardous chemicals as being high-priority through a screening method. Over the past 20 years, chemical ranking and scoring (CRS) methods have been applied in many countries; however, these CRS methods have a few limitations. Most of the existing methods only use some of the variables to calculate the hazard of chemicals or use the most conservative score without consideration of the correlation between chemical toxicities. This evaluation could underestimate or overestimate the real health hazard of the chemicals. To overcome the limitations of these methods, we developed a new CRS method using the Mahalanobis–Taguchi System (MTS). The MTS, which conducts multivariate analysis, produced chemical rankings that took into accounts the correlation between variables related to chemical health hazards. Also, the proportion of chemicals managed by the Korea Chemicals Control Act that were given a high rating appeared to be higher when the MTS was used, compared to the existing methods. These results indicated that the new method evaluated the health hazards of chemicals more accurately, and we expect that the MTS method could be applied to a greater range of chemicals than the existing CRS methods.
Highlights
The number of hazardous chemicals has been steadily increasing with the production of new chemicals
The proportion of chemicals managed by the Korea Chemicals
We presented a new method using the Mahalanobis–Taguchi System (MTS) to overcome the limitations of existing
Summary
The number of hazardous chemicals has been steadily increasing with the production of new chemicals. About 200 to 300 new chemicals are produced each year, and about 45,000 types of chemicals are used in Korean workplaces [1]. For efficient management of chemicals, it is necessary to preferentially select hazardous chemicals as being high-priority through a screening method [2,3,4,5]. Over the past 20 years, chemical ranking and scoring (CRS) methods have been applied in many countries [6,7,8,9,10,11]. The European Union proposed the European Union Risk Ranking Method (EURAM) [12], and the Environmental Protection Agency introduced the Chemical Hazard Evaluation for Management
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More From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
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