Environmental risk assessment of chemicals and nanomaterials — The best foundation for regulatory decision-making?

Syberg, Kristian; Hansen, Steffen Foss

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.09.112

Cited by 42 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…11 Although the U.S. EPA was not referenced, the associated principles and terminology were subsequently adopted in the European Union (EU) via the publication of the first Technical Guidance Documents for new and old substances in 1993 and 1994. 12,13 The use of standardized testing was initiated in the 1970s and led by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a way to ensure mutual acceptance of data (MAD) for risk assessment. Ecotoxicological information and ecotoxicity testing using standard test organisms provide the backbone for ERA, as they are used to derive "safe" levels of exposure: the so-called predicted no effect concentration (PNEC).…”

Section: Environmental Risk Assessment and Standardized Ecotoxicity Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…14 The discussion and use of extrapolation factors in ERA stem from a report that the U.S. EPA had published in 1984 called "Estimating concern levels for concentrations of chemical substances in the environment". 13,17 In the report, the U.…”

Section: Environmental Risk Assessment and Standardized Ecotoxicity Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…17,18 Similarly, a laboratory-to-field ratio was derived by comparing experimental acute LC 50 data with field toxicity data, and was found to span from 12 to 5300. 13 Ecotoxicity testing of nanomaterials articles reporting on more than 1500 toxicity values (EC 50 / LC 50 /NOEC) across numerous different species for eight different ENMs. 19 It is well established that the ecotoxicity of ENMs is influenced by, and can be related to, the specific particle physico-chemical properties, but it is currently unclear exactly which properties affect ecotoxicity.…”

Section: Environmental Risk Assessment and Standardized Ecotoxicity Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of alternative testing strategies in environmental risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials

Hjorth

Holden

Hansen

et al. 2017

Environ. Sci.: Nano

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Section: Environmental Risk Assessment and Standardized Ecotoxicity Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Environmental Risk Assessment and Standardized Ecotoxicity Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Environmental Risk Assessment and Standardized Ecotoxicity Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of alternative testing strategies in environmental risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials

Hjorth

Holden

Hansen

et al. 2017

Environ. Sci.: Nano

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“…EQS are based on several calculations depending on the context and institutions such as predicted-no-effect concentrations (PNECs) [19] and specific concentration limits (SCLs) [17]. Specifically, the derivation of EQSs results from a combination of assessment factors with toxicity endpoints mainly estimated from measured exposure responses of a set of target species to a certain chemical compound [17,19,27,37]. Estimating reliable toxicity endpoints is challenging and very controversial [28,32].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recommendations to address uncertainties in environmental risk assessment using toxicokinetics-toxicodynamics models

Baudrot

Charles

2018

Preprint

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Cite as:Baudrot V and Charles S. (2018). Recommendations to address uncertainties in environmental risk assessment using toxicokinetics-toxicodynamics models. bioRxiv 356469, ver. 3 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Ecol. ABSTRACTProviding reliable environmental quality standards (EQSs) is a challenging issue in environmental risk assessment (ERA). These EQSs are derived from toxicity endpoints estimated from dose-response models to identify and characterize the environmental hazard of chemical compounds such as those released by human activities. These toxicity endpoints include the classical x% effect/lethal concentrations at a specific time t (EC/LC(x, t)) and the new multiplication factors applied to environmental exposure profiles leading to x% effect reduction at a specific time t (M F (x, t), or denoted LP (x, t) by the EFSA). However, classical dose-response models used to estimate toxicity endpoints have some weaknesses, such as their dependency on observation time points, which are likely to differ between species (e.g., experiment duration). Furthermore, real-world exposure profiles are rarely constant over time, which makes the use of classical dose-response models difficult and compromises the derivation of M F (x, t). When dealing with survival or immobility toxicity test data, these issues can be overcome with the use of the general unified threshold model of survival (GUTS), a toxicokinetics-toxicodynamics (TKTD) model that provides an explicit framework to analyse both time-and concentration-dependent data sets as well as obtain a mechanistic derivation of EC/LC(x, t) and M F (x, t) regardless of x and at any time t of interest. In addition, the assessment of a risk is inherently built upon probability distributions, such that the next critical step for ERA is to characterize the uncertainties of toxicity endpoints and, consequently, those of EQSs. With this perspective, we investigated the use of a Bayesian framework to obtain the uncertainties from the calibration process and to propagate them to model predictions, including LC(x, t) and M F (x, t) derivations. We also explored the mathematical properties of LC(x, t) and M F (x, t) as well as the impact of different experimental designs to provide some recommendations for a robust derivation of toxicity endpoints leading to reliable EQSs: avoid computing LC(x, t) and M F (x, t) for extreme x values (0 or 100%), where uncertainty is maximal; compute M F (x, t) after a long period of time to take depuration time into account and test survival under few correlated and uncorrelated pulses of the contaminant in terms of depuration.

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“…The scientific capabilities for quantifying both probabilities and magnitude related to many risks are often relatively uncertain, which implies that quantification of risk is inherently uncertain [2]. This means that interpretations of risk are very important for human's response to the risk, since the risk perception, rather than an (often unknown) actual estimation of risk, will guide societal response to the risk.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk Perception of Plastic Pollution: Importance of Stakeholder Involvement and Citizen Science

Syberg

Hansen

Christensen

et al. 2017

The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry

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Risk perception has a significant impact on how society reacts to a given risk. There have been cases where a mismatch between the actual risk and the perception of it has led to poor decisions on societal initiatives, such as inappropriate regulatory measures. It is therefore important that the perception of risk is based on an informed foundation acknowledging the biases and drivers that inevitably go with risk perception. Plastic pollution differs in regard to other classical risks, such as those posed by chemicals or genetically modified organisms (GMOs), since the pollution is more visible and already has a significant magnitude. At the same time, everyone is familiar with using plastic, and our daily lives are highly dependent on the use of plastic. This offers some potential to strengthen the societal risk perception and subsequently implement effective measures to address the pollution.In this chapter, we define eight risk perception drivers (voluntariness, control, knowledge, timing, severity, benefit, novelty, and tangibility) and relate these drivers to plastic pollution. We discuss the process in which plastic pollution has been recognized as an important environmental problem by scientists, the public, and policy makers and elaborate on how the eight risk drivers have influenced this process. Plastic pollution has several of the characteristics that can enhance people's perception of the risk as being important and which has generated great awareness of the problem. The chapter finally discusses how risk perception can be improved by greater stakeholder involvement and utilization of citizen science and thereby improve the foundation for timely and efficient societal measures.

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Environmental risk assessment of chemicals and nanomaterials — The best foundation for regulatory decision-making?

Cited by 42 publications

References 40 publications

The role of alternative testing strategies in environmental risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials

The role of alternative testing strategies in environmental risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials

Recommendations to address uncertainties in environmental risk assessment using toxicokinetics-toxicodynamics models

Risk Perception of Plastic Pollution: Importance of Stakeholder Involvement and Citizen Science

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