Threat by chemical substances: Legislation, production, use and waste - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 45

Figure 2.2 Life cycle of chemical substances.
Risk assessment during the life cycle of chemicals includes workplace risk, ecological
and human risk assessment. The produced and emitted amount of chemical substances
and the concentration derived on this basis in the environment should be compared
with the sensitivity of the users of the identified environment—i.e., the workers in the
factories, the ecosystem in the polluted or potentially polluted surface waters and soils,
and the human receptors using the potentially or actually contaminated air, water, soil
and food.
The products, containing only a few or many chemical substances can be han-
dled as mixtures of chemical substances and the same assessment can calculate their
ecological or human health risk due to their adverse (toxic, mutagenic, reprotoxic,
etc.) effects. The risks of all hazardous chemicals in the product should be summed
up, or if they cannot be added up, the known interactions should be taken into
consideration.
Products have an impact on the environment not only due to their hazardous
chemical components, but also due to the renewable or nonrenewable energy and
material requirement, contributing to the production of CO 2 , methane or ozone deplet-
ing chemicals and other globally appearing threats corrupting sustainability (see also
Chapter 1).
Even if the information on the produced and used tonnages is available, the
spatial distribution remains uncertain. After the registration of the chemicals in
Europe according to the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of
Chemicals (REACH Regulation), the community will have the information on pro-
duced and used amount at European level, but it will not solve the locally arisen
problems.