The European Union Environmental Footprint (EU‐EF) is a harmonized method to measure and communicate the life cycle environmental performance of products and organizations. Among 16 different impact categories included in the EU‐EF, 1 focuses on the impact of substances on freshwater ecosystems and requires the use of toxicity data. This paper evaluates the use of the aquatic toxicity data submitted to the EU Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation. It presents an automated computerized approach for selecting substance ecotoxicity values, building on a set of quality and reliability criteria to extract the most relevant data points for calculating the substance specific hazard values. A selected set of criteria led to the exclusion of approximately 82% of the original REACH ecotoxicological data available as of May 2015 due to incomplete initial encoding of the data by the REACH registrant, missing information such as duration of exposure, endpoint measured, species tested, and imprecise toxicity values (i.e., reported with greater than or less than signs). From an initial set of 305 068 ecotoxicity data records available in the REACH database, the final usable database contains 54 353 toxicity records (29 421 characterized as acute and 24 941 as chronic) covering 9 taxonomic groups, with algae, crustaceans, and fish representing 93% of the data. This data set is valuable for assessing the environmental toxicity of the substance contained whether through traditional substance risk assessment, product toxicity labeling, life cycle assessment (LCA) or environmental impact assessment approaches. However, the resulting loss of approximately 82% of the data suggests that changes in procedures used to generate, report, and document the data within REACH are needed to improve data utility for the various assessment approaches. The rules used to select the data to be used are the primary focus of this article. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2019;15:783–795. © 2019 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).

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Using the European Union's Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) ecotoxicity data, this paper compares 3 different approaches to calculate final substance toxicity hazard values using the USEtox approach (chronic EC50 + acute EC50/2), using only acute EC50 equivalent data (EC50eq), and using only chronic no observed effect concentration equivalent (NOECeq) data. About 4008, 4853, and 5560 substance hazard values could be calculated for the USEtox model, acute only, and chronic only approaches, respectively. The USEtox model provides hazard values similar to the ones based on acute EC50 data only. Although there is a large amount of variability in the ratios, the data support acute EC50eq to chronic NOECeq ratios (calculated as geometric mean) of 10.64, 10.90, and 4.21 for fish, crustaceans, and algae respectively. Comparison of the calculated hazard values with the criteria used by the EU chemical Classification, Labelling, and Packaging regulation (CLP) shows the USEtox model underestimates the number of compounds categorized as very toxic to aquatic life and/or having long‐lasting effects. In contrast, use of the chronic NOEC data shows a good agreement with CLP. It is therefore proposed that chronic NOECeq are used to derive substance hazard values to be used in the EU Environmental Footprint. Due to poor data availability for some chemicals, the uncertainty of the final hazard values is expected to be high. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2019;15:796–807. © 2019 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).

Purpose The EU environmental footprint (EF) is a life cycle assessment (LCA)-based method which aims at assessing the environmental impacts of products and organisations 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 that 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 lackness of a robust fate modelling for 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 transparency and 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 The new approach increased the number of characterised chemicals in the three impact categories: ECOTOX (6038 chemicals, + 140%), HTOX_c (1024 chemicals, + 70%) and HTOX_nc (3317 chemicals, + 660%). Moreover, specific derivation principles were defined for assigning CFs also to relevant groups of chemicals (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), and specific strategies were implemented to better align LCA toxicity data with data used for risk assessment purposes. Conclusions The new set of CFs was calculated to ensure a broader coverage of characterised chemicals and to overcome some limitations of the USEtox® model identified during the environmental footprint pilot phase.

Purpose Recent developments in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) target at better addressing biodiversity impacts, including the extended modeling of drivers of biodiversity loss. This led to the development of multiple LCIA methods addressing the area of protection of ecosystem quality (i.e, biodiversity loss) over time. This paper aims at systematically comparing available operational LCIA methods and models for assessing the main drivers of biodiversity impacts of EU consumption and unveiling similarities and differences among current methods. Methods This paper compares the biodiversity impacts of EU consumption by implementing eight LCIA methods and models: five full LCIA methods (namely, LC-IMPACT, Impact World + , Ecological Scarcity 2013, ReCiPe 2016, and Stepwise), a land-use intensity-specific LCIA model, and two approaches based on the GLOBIO model. The EU Consumption Footprint model is adopted as case study. The comparative analysis between the assessed methods aimed at identifying convergent and divergent results regarding the drivers of biodiversity impacts of EU consumption. The analysis focused on four different levels: impact category, representative product (modeled consumed products), inventory process, and elementary flow. The agreement among the methods in defining an element as relevant was evaluated. Finally, gaps among methods were assessed in terms of coverage of impact categories and elementary flows. Results and discussion The analysis unveiled that there is a certain level of agreement among available LCIA methods and models regarding the most contributing impact categories and products to the overall biodiversity footprint due to EU consumption. Land use, climate change, and ecotoxicity had a major contribution to overall impacts, thereby highlighting their role as drivers of biodiversity loss. Biodiversity impacts were due to a limited number of consumed products, where food (meat), mobility, and household goods were identified as top contributors. Most contributing inventory processes and elementary flows were associated to most contributing representative products (e.g, animal feed). The relevance and presence of elementary flows in LCIA methods and models were heterogeneous for most of the impact categories. Conclusions The results of this study highlight the importance of impact category coverage in the assessment of biodiversity impacts. Limited coverage of impact categories (e.g, methods limited to assess land use) might underestimate the impacts of other drivers of biodiversity loss, especially climate change and ecotoxicity. Further efforts are required to assess the effects of spatial regionalization and the inclusion of missing drivers, recently developed in LCIA.