Inventory of LCIA selection methods for assessing toxic releases. Methods and typology report part B

This report describes an inventory of Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) selection methods for assessing toxic releases. It consists of an inventory of current selection methods and other Chemical Ranking and Scoring (CRS) methods assessed to be relevant for the development of (a) new selection method(s) in Work package 8 (WP8) of the OMNIITOX project. The selection methods and the other CRS methods are described in detail, a set of evaluation criteria are developed and the methods are evaluated against these criteria. This report (Deliverable 11B (D11B)) gives the results from task 7.1d, 7.1e and 7.1f of WP 7 for selection methods. The other part of D11 (D11A) is reported in another report and deals with characterisation methods. A selection method is a method for prioritising chemical emissions to be included in an LCIA characterisation of toxic releases, i.e. calculating indicator scores by a characterisation method for the impact categories covering ecotoxicity and human toxicity. A selection method is therefore not a characterisation method like the “simple base method” and the “base method” that are going to be developed within WP8 but the purpose of a selection method is to focus the effort within characterisation. Selection methods are used within LCIA to select those chemical emissions (mapped in the inventory part of the LCA in question) that are expected to contribute significantly to the characterisation and exclude the insignificant ones. In this way only significant emissions (i.e. the selected ones) are included in the typically more data demanding and more time demanding characterisation step.