Toxicity impacts in the environmental footprint method: calculation principles

Purpose. The EU Environmental Footprint (EF) is a life cycle assessment – based method which aims at assessing the environmental impacts of products and organizations through 16 midpoint impact categories, among which three address toxicity-related impacts. This paper presents the principles underpinning the calculation of the set of Characterisation Factors (CFs) for the toxicity-related impact categories in the EF version 3.0: freshwater ecotoxicity (ECOTOX), human toxicity – cancer (HTOX_c) and human toxicity – non-cancer (HTOX_nc). Methods. In order to respond to the issues emerged during the EF pilot phase, the input data and the calculation principles of the USEtox® model were updated. In particular: (i) Robustness Factors (RFs) were introduced to reduce the dominance of metals and to balance the inappropriate modelling of non-organic compounds in USEtox®; (ii) high quality data were selected from databases of EU agencies (European Chemicals Agency and European Food Safety Authority) to guarantee the reliability of input data; and (iii) a new approach based on HC20 (Hazard Concentration killing 20% of the exposed population) was implemented to derive freshwater ecotoxicity Effect Factors (EfF). Results and discussion.

SALA Serenella;  BIGANZOLI Fabrizio;  SANYE MENGUAL Esther;  SAOUTER Erwan; 

2022-06-23

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG

JRC128694

0948-3349 (online),   

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-022-02033-0,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128694,   

10.1007/s11367-022-02033-0 (online),