Abstract
The scientific consensus model USEtox® has been developed since 2003 under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme-Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Life Cycle Initiative as a harmonized approach for characterizing human and freshwater toxicity in life cycle assessment and other comparative assessment frameworks. Using physicochemical substance properties, USEtox quantifies potential human toxicity and freshwater ecotoxicity impacts by combining environmental fate, exposure, and toxicity effects information, considering multimedia fate and multipathway exposure processes. The main source to obtain substance properties for USEtox 1.01 and 2.0 is the Estimation Program Interface (EPI Suite™) from the US Environmental Protection Agency. However, since the development of the original USEtox substance databases, new chemical regulations have been enforced in Europe, such as the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) and the Plant Protection Products regulations. These regulations require that a chemical risk assessment for humans and the environment is performed before a chemical is placed on the European market. Consequently, additional physicochemical property data and new toxicological endpoints are now available for thousands of chemical substances. The aim of the present study was to explore the extent to which the new available data can be used as input for USEtox-especially for application in environmental footprint studies-and to discuss how this would influence the quantification of fate and exposure factors. Initial results show that the choice of data source and the parameters selected can greatly influence fate and exposure factors, leading to potentially different rankings and relative contributions of substances to overall human toxicity and ecotoxicity impacts. Moreover, it is crucial to discuss the relevance of the exposure factor for freshwater ecotoxicity impacts, particularly for persistent highly adsorbing and bioaccumulating substances. Environ Toxicol Chem 2017;36:3463-3470. © 2017 The Authors. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of SETAC.
Highlights
The calculation of impacts on humans and the environment associated with the use and release of chemical substances is of increasing importance in numerous policies, including product policies
In the present report, using the same list of pesticides as in our complementary study [16], we evaluate the relevance and implications of using different physicochemical properties from those currently implemented in USEtox to estimate fate and exposure factors
To illustrate the differences in resulting fate and exposure results as well as the implications for a possible life cycle assessment (LCA) study outcome related to the selection of input data sources for physicochemical substance properties, 6 pesticides have been selected based on our complementary study [16] that are being used in plant protection products as active substances and that are available in the current USEtox organic substances database, namely clomazone (Chemical Abstracts Service [CAS] 81777-89-1), fludioxonil (CAS 131341-86-1), halosulfuron methyl (CAS 100784-20-1), prosulfocarb (CAS 52888-80-9), teflubenzuron (CAS 83121-18-0), and fenbutatin oxide (CAS 13356-08-6)
Summary
The calculation of impacts on humans and the environment associated with the use and release of chemical substances is of increasing importance in numerous policies, including product policies. The fact that those models produced diverging characterization results spanning several orders of magnitude [3] led to a global consensusbuilding process under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme–Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (UNEP-SETAC) Life Cycle Initiative that [4,5,6,7]. The USEtox model is officially endorsed by the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, is widely used in LCA and other comparative assessment frameworks, and has been included in the International
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