Life Cycle Impact Assessment - Task Force 3: Toxicity impacts

Aims

This task force aims at establishing recommended practice and guidance for use for the ecotoxicity, human toxicity and related categories with direct effects on human health, i.e: Ecotoxicity, human toxicity, ionising radiation, accidents and noise. Photochemical smog and respiratory inorganics will be coordinated with task force 4. The task force will address midpoint categories and their relation to damage categories human health and biotic natural environment. Specific challenges for each impact category are defined in the LCIA definition study document.

Motivation

Impacts on human health and on ecosystems linked to the use and emissions of different toxics are of central importance to the development of sustainable innovative technology, e.g. in the fields of transportation, goods or housing. On the one hand, the Life Cycle Initiative can take profit of significant progresses carried out in LCIA of toxics. On the other hand, several crucial shortages of present methodologies need to be addressed to enable a proper interpretation of LCI results, e.g. for long-term emissions of heavy metals or other present practice of LCIA. Interaction with e.g. REACH are of high interest on the application side.

Work program and work process

According to this content, the following work programme is foreseen:
• State of the art review and determination of a modular framework for the estimation of toxicological human health and ecotox characterisation factors (functional components for the fate of chemicals, human exposure pathway models, toxicological (cancer + non-cancer) effects/eco-toxicological effects). This includes:
a) A review on state-of-the-art of existing projects and actions, summarizing recent work from different projects and from SETAC working group;
b) Summarized results of method comparisons;
c) The determination of base criteria for evaluation of effect and fate and exposure models on work from SETAC WIA2, OMNIITOX and other sources.
• Expert seminar on the review of toxicity base models (Lausanne, December 2003). This expert seminar and connected preparatory work aims to make a proposal for base models and initiate a review process, while stimulating collaboration between OMNIITOX model development, TRACI development and scientists active.
• Expert workshop on Metals essentiality and bioavailability in LCIA. This expert seminar and connected preparatory work aims to focus on the characterisation of metals (mineralogy and associated mobility, bio-availability, speciation, essentiality; background concentrations and natural releases of metals, choice of reference; and the choice of compartments for assessment) in RA and LCIA, starting a process of methodology development that is highly needed and desired by industry. The first activity in this field was the ICMM workshop in Montreal, in 2002. The present expert seminar will build on that. A subtask force must be established to bring experts with ERA expertise and LCIA expertise together, including experts from existing projects in this field. Additional resources should be sourced from the minerals industry and specifically the mined land rehabilitation research focus.
• Reconvened ILSI panel for review of proposals on human toxicity indicator in base model, regarding dose-effect response and severity.
• Invitation to specific domain experts, as well as open public invite, for specific proposals to suggest further improvements/additions.
• Data collection and supply for a wider range of chemicals, with the support of existing long term effort by different Environmental Protection Agency (e.g. US-EPA, EEA/JRC, etc.)
• Further investigation on the scope of the category regarding indoor emissions, worker health, accident statistics, ionizing and non-ionizing radiations.
• Selection of recommended models and calculation of generic factors corresponding to typical emission situations (2005).

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