Screening organic chemicals in commerce for emissions in the context of environmental and human exposure

Abstract

Quantitative knowledge of organic chemical release into the environment is essential to understand and predict human exposure as well as to develop rational control strategies for any substances of concern. While significant efforts have been invested to characterize and screen organic chemicals for hazardous properties, relatively less effort has been directed toward estimating emissions and hence also risks. Here, a rapid throughput method to estimate emissions of discrete organic chemicals in commerce has been developed, applied and evaluated to support screening studies aimed at ranking and identifying chemicals of potential concern. The method builds upon information in the European Union Technical Guidance Document and utilizes information on quantities in commerce (production and/or import rates), chemical function (use patterns) and physical-chemical properties to estimate emissions to air, soil and water within the OECD for five stages of the chemical life-cycle. The method is applied to 16,029 discrete substances (identified by CAS numbers) from five national and international high production volume lists. As access to consistent input data remains fragmented or even impossible, particular attention is given to estimating, evaluating and discussing uncertainties in the resulting emission scenarios. The uncertainty for individual substances typically spans 3 to 4 orders of magnitude for this initial tier screening method. Information on uncertainties in emissions is useful as any screening or categorization methods which solely rely on threshold values are at risk of leading to a significant number of either false positives or false negatives. A limited evaluation of the screening method's estimates for a sub-set of about 100 substances, compared against independent and more detailed emission scenarios presented in various European Risk Assessment Reports, highlights that up-to-date and accurate information on quantities in commerce as well as a detailed breakdown on chemical function are critically needed for developing more realistic emission scenarios.

Evaluating the consumption of chemical products and articles as proxies for diffuse emissions to the environment

“…Previous studies attempting to rank chemicals based on exposure have identied emission estimates as a major knowledge gap. [19][20][21][22] The eld of exposure science, and the protection of the environment and human health, can only advance if more data on use of chemicals in our society becomes available.…”

“…[16][17][18] A more indirect way to estimate environmental concentrations and to prioritize chemicals for further in-depth analysis and monitoring is to use emission data for chemicals. However, accurate data on emissions is missing for the majority of produced chemicals, and estimates from production volume and use have uncertainties spanning over several orders of magnitude, [19][20][21][22] due to lack of publicly available data from industry. A recent study however exploited condential business data on use characteristics and total tonnage placed on the EU market, which is provided in REACH registration dossiers and available to EU Member State Competent Authorities, to rank substances with high intrinsic potential to contaminate aqueous environments.…”

Evaluating the environmental fate of short-chain chlorinated paraffins (SCCPs) in the Nordic environment using a dynamic multimedia model

“…50 Emissions were allocated to different compartments based on the MOE estimated by the high-throughput screening method. 49 Half of the emissions to water were allocated to fresh and sea water, respectively, while emissions to soil were released entirely to agricultural soil. It was assumed that the model domain is surrounded by equally contaminated regions, and hence, that any inflows of SCCPs by air and water from outside regions are the same as the outflows.…”

“…The sensitivity and uncertainty analysis only investigated the impact of chemical properties (physicalchemical properties, environmental and metabolic HLs) on the predicted SCCPs concentrations after 70 years of emissions, as well as for persistence and LRAT. In general, the quantities of emissions are often recognized to be the main source of uncertainty, 34,49 and if included in the uncertainty analysis, the emissions would dominate ( Figure S12). Tables S6-S8 provide the absolute sensitivities as the average of the sensitivities for all SCCP formula groups.…”

Non-target and suspect characterisation of organic contaminants in ambient air, Part I: Combining a novel sample clean-up method with comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography

“…These methodologies are well-proven and appropriate for most legacy POPs, and therefore recommended as standard methods for POPs in the UNECE-EMEP (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe´s European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme) manual for sampling and chemical analysis (EMEP, 2019). The outcome of the established targeted analytical methods for quantitative measurements of important environmental pollutants are, however, limited as they are covering only a minor part of the currently available list of priority substances identified as potential contaminants (Arnot et al, 2011;Breivik et al, 2012;McLachlan et al, 2014;Vorkamp and Rigét, 2014;Reppas-Chrysovitsinos et al, 2017;NORMAN-network, 2019).…”