Authors
Saling, Peter
Abstract
The assessment of human toxicity is an important impact category that needs to be considered in a meaningful way within LCA studies. Meaningful results will support the improvement of products and processes in a holistic way. However, human toxicity aspects were under the investigation of several groups to come up with several methodologies that support practitioners in generating LCA studies. An industrial consortium developed a methodological approach named ProScale. Several experts form toxicological departments of industry as well as LCA specialists contributed to this development. One key principle of the method is the close link to risk assessment approaches, used by the European Commission in the REACH programme. There are many meaningful data, methods and assessments openly available which the ProScale method applies. The scope of our approach can be different in covering the whole supply chain or specific parts of the supply chain. It will be shown with different examples and interpretations because ProScale assesses hazard and direct exposure potentials from chemicals. The approach can be integrated in LCA to compare human toxicity potentials of alternatives. Furthermore, Environmental Product Declarations (“EPDs”) and Product Environmental Footprints (“PEFs”) in life cycle thinking can benefit from this risk-based approach. However, this characterization model is different from the classical ones but is easy to use and applicable for practitioners. We will show, how the information can be used in decision-making processes and how different stakeholders will be able to use the results.