Evaluating the environmental hazard of industrial chemicals from data collected during the REACH registration process

, ,
  Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2785v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Agricultural Science, Environmental Sciences
Keywords
PNECs, Assessment Factors, biocides, Daphnia magna, pharmaceuticals, priority pollutants
Copyright
© 2017 Gustavsson et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Gustavsson MB, Hellohf A, Backhaus T. 2017. Evaluating the environmental hazard of industrial chemicals from data collected during the REACH registration process. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2785v1

Abstract

Registration dossiers for 11678 industrial chemicals were retrieved from the database of the European Chemicals Agency, of which 3566 provided a numerical entry for the corresponding predicted no effect concentration for the freshwater environment (PNEC). A distribution-based examination of 2244 of these entries reveals that the average PNEC of an industrial chemical in Europe is 238 nmol/L, covering a span of 9 orders of magnitude. A comparison with biocides, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and WFD-priority pollutants reveals that, in average, industrial chemicals are least hazardous (hazard ranking: industrial chemicals << pharmaceuticals < pesticides < Water Framework Directive priority pollutants < biocides). However, 280 industrial chemicals have a lower environmental threshold than the median pesticide and 73 have a lower environmental threshold than even the median biocide. Industrial chemicals produced and/or imported in higher tonnages have, on average, higher PNECs which most likely is due to the lower assessment factors used for the PNEC determination. This pattern indicates that the initial AF of 1000 comprises a measure of conservatism. The vast majority of PNEC values are driven by EC50 and NOEC data from tests with Daphnia magna. Tests with marine species are rarely provided for the hazard characterization of industrial chemicals.

Author Comment

Manuscript accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Supplemental Information

The cumulative distributions of PNECfreshwater and PNECmarine.for industrial chemicals

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2785v1/supp-1

the data-set contains all PNEC freshwater and marine for all compounds which passed the selection criteria as mentioned in the Materials section

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2785v1/supp-2

The sheet contains all effect data gathered from ECHA:s homepage that are within the 0.9-1.1*AF. This is thus the dataset before the NOEC data is excluded if EC50 data is available (See Materials)

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2785v1/supp-3

The sheet contains the compounds (and asscociated thresholds) which are present in more than one regulatory class

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2785v1/supp-4

Results from tukeys post-hoc test between regulatory classes and between tonnage bands as well as an table with extended summary statistics for the regulatory classes

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2785v1/supp-5

Contains all data needed to generate figure 1. That includes all environmental thresholds for industrial chemicals, biocides, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and WFD priority pollutants (QS pelagic)

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2785v1/supp-6