Scientific and engineering improvement of environmental risk management - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 401

skin cancer, cataracts, immune-supression, crop damage, ecosystem damage, plastic
degradation (these are end points), just the ozone depletion potential of the contam-
inant is used. Instead of the different health risks of toxicants, the carcinogenic or
non-carcinogenic equivalent potential is used based on EC 50 or ED 50 values, metrics
for the hazard of a chemical substance.
Both ERA and LCIA are being continuously developed in order to bring them
closer to each other, and to merge them if required by the environmental management
task. The two tools should become able to cover all spatial and time-related dimensions
depending on the scope and phase of environmental management and decision making.
Coupling the two can be advantageous, e.g. they may be used as two tiers of risk
management: i) applying LCIA as the first qualitative evaluation step to find the priority
impacts in a region, or ii) applying ERA for one or a few chemicals at local scale and
LCIA for the regionally or globally appearing impacts.
Developments in LCIA resulted in several software tools, which calculate so-called
characterization factors for ecotoxicity and human toxicity at both midpoint and
end-point level. For human toxicity, characterization factors for carcinogens, for non-
carcinogens, and overall characterization factors are provided in most of the software,
based on the LCIA concept and the connected databases. For example USES-LCA con-
tains a database of 3396 chemicals. The developers introduced the worksheet “scenario
options'' where assumption preferences can be chosen such as emission compartment,
the chemicals, and the time horizon (steady state or 100 years). Outcomes of the
calculations can be read on an “output'' sheet (Van Zelm et al. , 2009)
IMPACT 2002

vQ2.2 proposes a feasible implementation of a combined
midpoint/damage-oriented approach (Goedkomp et al. , 2008). The IT tool cre-
ates links between all types of LCI results via several midpoint categories (human
carcinogenicity, non-carcinogenic toxicity, respiratory effects due to inorganics, ion-
izing radiation, ozone layer depletion, photochemical oxidation, aquatic ecotoxicity,
terrestrial ecotoxicity, aquatic acidification, aquatic eutrophication, terrestrial acidifi-
cation/nitrification, land occupation, turbined water (hydropower production), global
warming, nonrenewable energy consumption, mineral extraction, water withdrawal,
and water consumption) to four damage categories: human health, ecosystem quality,
climate change, and resources. The new developments of IMPACT 2002

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focused
on the comparative assessment of human toxicity and ecotoxicity, the weak points of
former concepts and methodologies. For other impact categories, methods have been
transferred or adapted mainly from the Eco-indicator 99 (Goedkoop and Spriensma,
2000), the CML 2002 methodology (Guinée et al. , 2002), the IPCC list (IPCC, 2001),
the US EPA ozone depletion potential list (EPA ODP, 2013), the ecoinvent database
(Frischknecht et al. , 2004) and Maendly & Humbert (2011) for turbined water
(IMPACT 2002

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, 2012).
ReCiPe (2012) developed the above-mentioned harmonized midpoint-endpoint
model for the main impact categories linking to human health, ecosystem damage
and resource depletion (Goedkoop et al. , 2009). The user can choose between several
midpoints of high certainty

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- relevant to human health damage:

◦

decrease in the stratospheric ozone layer (ppt*year);

◦ absorbed ionizing radiation dose (man*Sv);