Life Cycle Assessment and Risk Assessment

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool for environmental assessment of product and systems – over the whole life cycle from acquisition of raw materials to the end-of-life of the product – and encompassing all environmental impacts of emissions and resource usage, e.g. global warming, acidification and toxicity. Whereas Risk Assessment (RA) aims to identify absolute risks, LCA assess potential or relative impacts. LCA is readily applicable to nanotechnologies and several studies have been carried out, but LCA faces large problems when addressing toxic impacts of nanomaterials emitted during the life cycle. The models for assessing toxic impacts in LCA are to a large extent based on those developed for RA, e.g. EUSES, and require basic information about the inherent properties of the emissions like solubility, LogKow,ED50 etc. Additionally, it is a prerequisite to know how to characterize the emissions, how should they be defined and classified and what should be measured? LCA have many of these issues in common with RA. There is a need to understand which properties of nanomaterials are crucial for the assessment of their potential transformation and fate as well as their ability to cause adverse effects on target organisms or systems. If we want to be able to assess toxic impacts both in LCA and in RA these issues need to be addressed by the RA community and the LCA community must follow closely the progress made.