Comparing the Advanced REACH Tool’s (ART) Estimates With Switzerland’s Occupational Exposure Data

Abstract

The Advanced REACH Tool (ART) is the most sophisticated tool used for evaluating exposure levels under the European Union's Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of CHemicals (REACH) regulations. ART provides estimates at different percentiles of exposure and within different confidence intervals (CIs). However, its performance has only been tested on a limited number of exposure data. The present study compares ART's estimates with exposure measurements collected over many years in Switzerland. Measurements from 584 cases of exposure to vapours, mists, powders, and abrasive dusts (wood/stone and metal) were extracted from a Swiss database. The corresponding exposures at the 50th and 90th percentiles were calculated in ART. To characterize the model's performance, the 90% CI of the estimates was considered. ART's performance at the 50th percentile was only found to be insufficiently conservative with regard to exposure to wood/stone dusts, whereas the 90th percentile showed sufficient conservatism for all the types of exposure processed. However, a trend was observed with the residuals, where ART overestimated lower exposures and underestimated higher ones. The median was more precise, however, and the majority (≥60%) of real-world measurements were within a factor of 10 from ART's estimates. We provide recommendations based on the results and suggest further, more comprehensive, investigations.

How to Obtain a Reliable Estimate of Occupational Exposure? Review and Discussion of Models’ Reliability

“…Van Tongeren et al [7] considered a wide range of substances (powders, metals, non-volatile liquids, and volatile substances). General powder and dust scenarios were considered by Landberg et al [26], Savic [44,45], and Schinkel [22,32,46], and scenarios concerning solids were evaluated in other studies [22,30,44,45]. Activities involving nano-powders (particularly TiO 2 , Al 2 O 3 , and SiO 2 ) were investigated by Bekker et al [29] and Liguori et al [47].…”

“…Activities involving nano-powders (particularly TiO 2 , Al 2 O 3 , and SiO 2 ) were investigated by Bekker et al [29] and Liguori et al [47]. Liquid scenarios were considered [26,32,44], as were vapors and mists [30,45,46] and volatile substances [7,22,27,30,43]. Other chemicals were evaluated by Landberg et al [14], and others evaluated benzene [24], ethylbenzene [33], toluene [3,37,42], ethyl acetate [36,39], and acetone [36].…”

Extrapolating the Applicability of Measurement Data on Worker Inhalation Exposure to Chemical Substances

“…c Source dataset available in Case study 3: The source dataset is taken from an ART validation study by Savic et al (2017). Following are the key information sufficient for determining the characteristics of read-across: ART AC5: application of liquids in high speed processes; liquid product; concentration of substance in mixture: 3.8%; room temperature; vapour pressure: 3800 Pa; near-field exposure; small-scale activities involving high speed movements; open process; LEV: other enclosing hoods; good house-keeping processes (although this is of sufficiently small influence to be discounted in the read-across calculations); indoors; room volume: 1000 m 3 ; ACH: 3.…”

“…It currently contains 2007 exposure measurements, arranged into 122 exposure situations. To validate the calibration approach, the SUVA database (Savic et al, 2017) was used. It contains 585 exposure measurements.…”

“…For each situation, the model central estimate of the GM (8-h TWA) was obtained. All the determinants, associated with each exposure scenario, were recorded using the same scheme as Savic et al (2017). (ii) The GM and geometric standard deviation (GSD) were estimated from the measurements available on these 122 exposure situations.…”