Framework for building national inventories of toxic emissions to air, water and soil, in Europe
Abstract
The European INventory of Existing Commercial chemical Substances (EINECS) lists over 100 000 chemical substances used on the market. Over 16 000 chemical substances have been registered in REACH since 2008. In comparison, only ca. 3 000 substances are associated with characterization factors in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) to express their potential toxic impact on human health (cancer and non-cancer effects) and freshwater ecosystems. Because of human activities, those pollutants may enter the environment in several different ways: they are emitted to air from the combustion of materials, released through wastewater from industries and households, applied to soils together with manure and pesticides, etc. Combined with the limited availability of release data, the sheer number of substances and the large variety of emission sources are challenges that one needs to overcome to quantify the overall toxic impacts of a country. Here, we therefore propose an updated methodology to build national inventories of toxic emissions in EU Member States in 2000-2014. The framework builds on earlier works and differentiates environmental compartments (air, water and soil) as well as anthropogenic sources (industries, households, manure and pesticides application on agricultural soils). It relies on existing and publicly available data, and extrapolation techniques are developed and used to fill in the gaps across countries in the entire period 2000-2014. The resulting harmonized inventories cover more than 500 substances, including both organics and inorganics such as persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals. Albeit still limited in substance coverage, it is thus possible to analyze the contribution of each substance and anthropogenic source to the toxic impacts on human health (human toxicity) and freshwater ecosystems (freshwater ecotoxicity), using LCIA methods such as the consensus model USEtox.
Info
Conference Abstract, 2018
UN SDG Classification
DK Main Research Area
Science/Technology
