Grantee Research Project Results
Final Report: NCCLC: Network for Rapid Assessment of Chemical Life Cycle Impact
EPA Grant Number: R835579Title: NCCLC: Network for Rapid Assessment of Chemical Life Cycle Impact
Investigators: Suh, Sangwon , Keller, Arturo A. , Scott, Susannah , Seshadri, Ram , Doherty, Michael
Institution: University of California - Santa Barbara
EPA Project Officer: Aja, Hayley
Project Period: December 1, 2013 through November 30, 2017 (Extended to November 30, 2019)
Project Amount: $4,887,644
RFA: EPA/NSF Networks for Characterizing Chemical Life Cycle (NCCLCs) (2013) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Chemical Safety for Sustainability
Objective:
Every day, there are about 15,000 chemicals newly registered to the Chemical Abstract Service (CAS). The ability for the research and regulatory communities to understand the environmental and human health implications of the growing number of chemicals falls short to the speed of growth in new chemicals. As a result, many chemicals are produced, used, and released to the environment without us understanding their environmental and human health implications.
The Network for Rapid Assessment of Chemical Life Cycle Impact of UCSB, which is internally referred to as the Chemical Life Cycle Collaborative (CLiCC) has developed a framework to enable early assessment of the life cycle impacts of novel chemicals and materials. The framework can also be used to fill-in data gaps in the prediction of life cycle impacts for existing chemicals with large data gaps.
The suite of methods, data, and tools developed under the project enable rapid assessments of chemicals’ toxicological properties, life cycle impact characteristics, as well as potential environmental and human health risk characteristics. The CLiCC tool equips industry, government, and research communities with coherent information based on up-to-date science, and help them flag major risk areas and prioritize further, in-depth analysis.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):
CLiCC tool (www.clicc.net)
Under this project, we built and launched the CLiCC Tool, which is fully operational through https://www.clicc.net. The tool allows multiple levels of analysis for wide range of users.
Underlying the CLiCC tool are various interactive modules and the databases that support them. The CLiCC team has 1) developed a Predictive Life Cycle Impact Assessment Module to estimate the impact of chemicals across cumulative energy demand, aquatic eco-toxicity, eco-indicator, ozone layer depletion, acidification and water demand; 2) developed a Life Cycle Inventory Module that recursively models chemical manufacturing processes to estimate heat and energy requirement for synthesizing a chemical product. 3) Finalized the underlying Life Cycle Inventory database containing substantial amount of chemical manufacturing information; 4) conducted preliminary sensitivity analyses for the Life Cycle Inventory module 5) created a module that connects chemical functional uses and product applications together to generate realistic estimates of releases; 6) developed two fate and transport modules to predict the dynamic long-term fate of organic chemicals and nanomaterials in the natural environment; 7) validated the organic chemical fate and transport model against the Level III standard; 8) completed regional data, allowing users to make reports for specific locations, for 12 local regions and one global region; 8) completed three human exposure modules for outdoor exposure, indoor air exposure, and dermal exposure scenarios; 9) collected and integrated an extensive database of experimental toxicity data; 10) built internal capabilities for three QSAR property modeling tools; 11) developed a module that accommodates in a consistent way the different sources of uncertainty and allows a coherent uncertainty and sensitivity characterization across all Risk Assessment modules in CLiCC; 12) completed case studies for Sustainable Apparel Coalition, Ecolab, and Sherwin-Williams, incorporating Predictive Life Cycle Impact Assessment, Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship Toxicity, Fate & Transport, and Exposure Assessment as integral components of the CLiCC Tool; Furthermore, we 13) continuously performed various outreach activities such as webinars introducing CLiCC, summer workshops for graduate students and professionals, stakeholder meetings and surveys, etc; 14) validated fate and transport module outputs with real-world emissions and measurements of pesticides in the environment; 15) optimized CLiCC modules for running on the backend of the online CLiCC Tool to minimize runtime for users; 16) Programmed an extensive Application Programming Interface (API) allowing CLiCC’s back-end modules to connect with the front-end of the online CLiCC Tool; 17) Contracted and collaborated with professional software engineers and web developers who have created and ensured the security of a beta version of the online CLiCC Tool; 18) Written detailed draft Technical User Guides for the Exposure and the Fate and Transport modules.
The web-based tool was launched in 2018. Currently, there are 177 registered users. The tool has international user-based encompassing research institutions, government, industry, and academia. For example, the CLiCC tool is being used as a part of a German national project carried out by German Fraunhofer Institute. Other institutions including governments, such as the Department of Toxic Substance Control (DTSC) of the State of California, Industries, such as Dow, and Academic institutions, such as Drexel University are continuing to use the tool.
After launching the CLiCC Tool, the team continued to maintain the tool, and performed various outreach and promotion activities. As a part of the outreach activities, the CLiCC team held a public webinar introducing attendees to the CLiCC tool, how to use the tool, and the team behind the tool. There were 289 registrations logged for the webinar, and 158 attendees. Attendees represented a diverse group of industry and academic institutions, as well as federal, state, and global governments. After the webinar, a comprehensive FAQ document was distributed to attendees, addressing all of the questions posed by attendees during the webinar. We conducted various outreach activities such as workshops, conference oral and poster presentations, webinars, keynote speeches, stakeholder meetings and surveys, etc. We have organized two summer workshops for graduate students and professionals. We have also written detailed Technical User Guides for the Exposure and the Fate and Transport modules. We also developed CLiCC tutorial videos and created CLiCC YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfrqlt-1m5pc17fn3TC75KA. Currently there are 10 videos uploaded to our channel.
Conclusions:
Advancement of science
The project resulted in 32 peer-reviewed journal publications and a number of manuscripts are currently under review or in development. The project also resulted in three workshops, and over 100 conference presentations based on the findings of this project. A full list of peer-reviewed journal publications can be found at the end of this report.
Development of workforce
This project supported, fully and partially, 10 PhD researchers, a similar number of master students, and three postdoctoral associates. The researchers trained under this project have been employed by Universities as faculty (3) and postdoctoral associate (1), and major industry such as Amazon (4) and Apeel Science (1). The summer workshops organized under CLiCC trained >40 PhD level researchers on LCA of chemicals.
Journal Articles on this Report : 9 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
Other project views: | All 34 publications | 24 publications in selected types | All 24 journal articles |
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Gavigan J, Timnit K, Macadam-Somer I, Suh S, Geyer R. Synthetic microfiber emissions to land rival those to waterbodies and are growing. PLOS ONE 2020;15(9):e0237839 |
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Meys R, Katelhon A, Backmann M, Winter B, Barrow A. Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emission plastics by a circular carbon economy. PLASTICS 2021;374(6563):71-76 |
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Parker N, Keller A. Screening ecological risk of pesticides and emerging contaminants under data limited conditions-Case study modeling urban and agricultural watersheds with OrganoFate. ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION 2021;288(117662) |
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Qin Y, Suh S. Method to decompose uncertainties in LCA results into contributing factors. THE INTERNALTIONAL JOURNAL OF LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT 2021;26:977-998 |
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Song R, Li D, Chang A, Tao M, Keller A, Sangwon S. Accelerating the pace of ecotoxicological assessment using artificial intelligence. AMBIO 2021;51(3):598-610 |
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Tao M, Keller A. ChemFate: A fate and transport modeling framework for evaluating radically different chemicals under comparable conditions. CHEMOSPHERE 2020;255(126897) |
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Tao M, Adler P, Larsen A, Sug S. Pesticide application rates and their toxicological impacts: why do they vary so widely across the US?. ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS 2020;15(12):124049 |
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Zheng J, Lin Z, Masanet E, Deshmukh S. Lifecycle cost and carbon implications of residential solar-plus-storage in California. iScience 2021;24(12):103492 |
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Tao M, Li D, Song R, Suh S, Keller A A. OrganoRelease–A framework for modeling the release of organic chemicals from the use and post-use of consumer products. Environmental Pollution 2018;234:751-761. |
R835579 (Final) |
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Progress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.
Project Research Results
- 2018 Progress Report
- 2017 Progress Report
- 2016 Progress Report
- 2015 Progress Report
- 2014 Progress Report
- Original Abstract
24 journal articles for this project