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Life-Cycle inventory/impact Assessment in the context of Chemical Risk Assessment: An Informatics-driven Scoping Review
Citation:
Goldsmith, M. AND D. Vallero. Life-Cycle inventory/impact Assessment in the context of Chemical Risk Assessment: An Informatics-driven Scoping Review. Presented at ISES 2014, Cincinnati, OH, October 12 - 16, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.
Description:
One of the goals of Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) is to compare the full range of environmental effects assignable to products and services in order to improve processes, support policy and provide a sound “systems-thinking” basis for decision support. How in fact LCA can be incorporated into chemical risk assessment (CRA) and management/decision support is not as clear, although it is widely anticipated to function symbiotically and provide comprehensive rigor in CRA. Aside from a brief history on how the two disciplines evolved and overlap, in this presentation we will provide an informatics driven scoping review and bibliometric analysis of the entire corpus of literature related to the overlap of LCA/CRA including, but not limited to; visualization of key themes, available and accessible data, information, modeling gaps and chemical space thus far explored in pre-existing literature into a concise overview. We will identify new data-streams, proxies and models to support the initiative of re-contextualizing or tailoring LCA to chemical risk assessment from both a source-to-exposure (receptor) and exposure (receptor)-to tissue dose -adverse outcome pathway context to identify key elements in supporting "screening-level" methods, and translate CRA into an LCA setting . [ Disclaimer: The views expressed in this abstract are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency]