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DecaBDE has been widely used as flame retardant in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE). It has recently been listed in Annex A of the Stockholm Convention. The time series flow, stock, and emission of DecaBDE in EEE in Japan were quantified. On this basis, a risk/risk trade-off analysis of substituting DecaBDE with triphenyl phosphate (TPhP) that is one possible phosphorus-based alternative was conducted. The stock of DecaBDE reached a maximum of ∼42 000 t in 1995. Even though the demand flow was negligible in 2030, the stock was modeled to be still ∼470 t. The outflow of DecaBDE, from the use phase to the disposal phase, peaked at ∼4500 t/yr. in 2001. The DecaBDE emission to atmosphere was mainly derived from the production phase before 1990. The use phase became the largest contributor to the total emission from 1995 to 2000. Whereas the disposal phase dominated the total emission from 2000 onward. In the substitution analysis, a trade-off between human and ecological health effect was revealed in case of replacing DecaBDE with TPhP. This study attempted to give an overall picture of DecaBDE application at national level providing insights into relevant environmental policy making.

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Measures for vehicle exhaust emissions aimed at reducing either air pollution or global warming could have counterproductive effects on one another. Increasing diesel passenger vehicles, which generally have lower CO 2 emissions than gasoline counterparts, leads to increasing particulate matter (PM) emissions, while gasoline has lower PM emissions than diesel. It is said that stringent limits on PM emission factors discourages improved CO 2 emission factors. Without including both effects in a risk evaluation, one cannot evaluate whether the total risk is reduced or not. Hence, we evaluated representative exhaust emission measures based on risk evaluation for both air pollution and global warming. Considering consumer choice between diesel and gasoline passenger vehicles and emissions standards adopted in Japan from 1995 to 2005, we built five cases for vehicle policy evaluation. For each case, we estimated disability-adjusted life years (DALY) as an index of human health risk caused by lung cancer linked to inhalation exposure of elemental carbon in PM as well as due to global warming linked to CO 2 . The results of our risk evaluation reveal that the case adopting the 2005 new long-term Japanese emission standard reduces the human health risk caused by lung cancer due to air pollution by 0.6 9 10 3 DALY, but would increase the risk due to global warming by 31.9 9 10 3 DALY compared with the case of adopting EURO 4, for the same conditions of passenger vehicle choice from 1995. These results suggest that the characteristics of Japanese emissions standards are mainly designed to reduce air pollution.