Environmental Ranking of European Industrial Facilities by Toxicity and Global Warming Potentials

We present a methodology to develop the integrated toxicity and climate change risk assessment of Europe based facilities, industries and regions. There is an increasingly important need for large scale sustainability measurement solutions for company reporting with high granularity. In this paper we measure key aspects of Sustainable Development Goals in terms of human, cancer and non-cancer toxicity, ecotoxicity together with global warming impact potentials from point source pollutant releases of more than 10,000 companies and their 33,000 facilities in Europe from 2001 to 2017 by using the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register. For our assessment, we deploy a scientific consensus model, USEtox for characterizing human and ecotoxicological impacts of chemicals and the global warming potential values from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We discuss water and air emissions of dozens of pollutants in urban, rural, coastal and inland areas. Companies in the electricity production sector are estimated to have the largest human toxicity impact potential (46% of total) and the largest global warming impact potential (50%). In the overall economy, the correlation between facilities’ global warming and toxicity impact potentials is positive, however, not very strong. Therefore, we argue that carbon footprint of industrial organizations can be only used as a climate change risk indicator, but not as an overall environmental performance indicator.

ERHART Szilard;  ERHART Kornél; 

2023-02-14

NATURE PORTFOLIO

JRC130383

2045-2322 (online),   

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25750-w#citeas,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC130383,   

10.1038/s41598-022-25750-w (online),