More about ERA
There are many different environmental risk assessments, for example safety
risk assessment, pollution risk assessment and natural disaster risk assessment.
The risk assessment carried out according to European regulations (as
laid out in the
Directive 93/67/EEC and
Regulation 1488/94) is
conducted following the detailed methodology in the Technical Guidance
Document on Risk Assessment for New and Existing Substances (TGD).
Only the risk assessment according to TGD is further described on this website.
The scope of the risk assessment covers emissions and consequent
environmental impact at each stage of the life-cycle of a chemical substance, from
production, through processing, formulation and use, to recycling and disposal.
Protection targets for the environment include the atmosphere, aquatic organisms,
sediment dwelling organisms, soil-dwelling organisms, micro-organisms in waste
water treatment plants, and mammals and birds exposed via accumulation up the
food chain.
EUSES
The European Union System for the Evaluation of
Substances (EUSES)
is a computer programme for conducting risk assessments according to the TGD. The EUSES was developed
for quantitative assessment of the risks posed by new and existing chemical
substances to the human health and the environment.
Risk assessment in EUSES is carried out in a stepwise procedure encompassing
the following stages (see Figure below):
1. Exposure assessment
Estimation of the concentrations to which
environmental compartments are or may be exposed or doses to which humans are or
may be exposed.
- Emission module: emission rates for various life cycle stages can be set
by the user, or emission factors can be chosen from predifined tables, based
on the known properties, uses and functions of a substance.
- Distribution module: contains all the models necessary to estimate
the distribution of a substance in the environment.
- Exposure module: calculates the exposure levels for the protection targets.
2. Effects (dose-response) assessment
Estimation of the concentrations or doses at which no detrimental effects
can be detected.
- Toxicity data: gathering of available toxicological and ecotoxicological
data.
- Extrapolation: depending on the number and quality of the data,
extrapolation (safety) factors are applied to the data.
- No-effect levels: based on the data and extrapolation factors, no-effect
levels are calculated.
3. Risk characterisation
Estimation of the incidence and severity of the
adverse effects likely to occur in an environmental compartment due to actual or
predicted exposures to a substance. The estimation is expressed as ratios
between predicted exposure levels or doses and predicted no-effect levels or
doses for the protection targets. These ratios are called Risk Characterisation
Ratios (RCRs)
More information and the software itself are available on the
EUSES
site of the European Chemicals Bureau (ECB).
More information on ERA and tools for ERA can be found in the report
Methods and Tools for Assessment of Environmental Risk
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