Evaluation of selection methods for toxicological impacts in LCA recommendations for OMNIITOX

Goal, Scope and Background  

The aim of this study has been to come up with recommendations on how to develop a selection method (SM) within the method development research of the OMNHTOX project. An SM is a method for prioritization of chemical emissions to be included in a Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) characterisation, in particular for (eco)toxicological impacts. It is therefore designed for pre-screening to support a characterisation method. The main reason why SMs are needed in the context of LCIA is the high number of chemical emissions that potentially contribute to the impacts on ecosystems and human health. It will often not be feasible to cover all emissions with characterisation factors and, therefore, there exists a need to focus the effort on the most significant chemical emissions in the characterisation step. Until now not all LCA studies include tox-icity-related impact categories, and when they do there are typically many gaps. This study covers the only existing methods explicitly designed as SMs (EDIP-selection, Priofactor and CPM-selection), the dominating Chemical Ranking and Scoring (CRS) method in Europe (EURAM) and in the USA (WMPT) that can be adapted for this purpose, as well as methods presenting novel approaches which could be valuable in the development of improved SMs (CART analysis and Hasse diagram technique).