Hazardous Substances and Human Health
Exposure, Impact and External Cost Assessment at the European Scale
- 1st Edition, Volume 8 - January 19, 2006
- Imprint: Elsevier Science
- Author: Till M Bachmann
- Language: English
- Hardback ISBN:9 7 8 - 0 - 4 4 4 - 5 2 2 1 8 - 4
- eBook ISBN:9 7 8 - 0 - 0 8 - 0 4 6 2 5 2 - 3
There is widespread public concern about hazardous chemicals that are contained in air, soil, water and food. Policy has therefore adopted a series of laws and regulations… Read more
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Request a sales quoteThere is widespread public concern about hazardous chemicals that are contained in air, soil, water and food. Policy has therefore adopted a series of laws and regulations concerning emissions into and concentration levels in different media including food. As policy makers do not only have to consider the protection of the environment but also need to ensure a well-functioning economy at the same time, these limit or target values need to be set in a balanced way. The main problem, however, is to compare the costs for achieving these targets with the benefits to society by having a smaller exposure to hazardous substances (cost-benefit analysis).
This book sets out to improve the reliability of cost-benefit analyses particularly of hazardous substances present in air, water, soil and food. It suggests that the human health risk assessment of chemicals is performed in a bottom-up analysis, i.e., following a spatially resolved multimedia modelling approach. In order to support cost-benefit analyses, the approach is accompanied by monetary valuation of human health impacts, yielding so-called external costs. Results for selected priority metals show that these external costs are small compared to those by the classical air pollutants and involve rather long time horizons touching on the aspect of intergenerational equity within sustainable development. When including further hazardous substances, the total external costs attributable to contaminants are expected to be more substantial.
environmentalists
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Zusammenfassung
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Abbreviations and acronyms
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Assessment of human health impacts and the approach followed
- 2.1 Definitions and considerations of some terms
- 2.2 Impact Pathway Approach
- 2.3 Model aim and requirements
- 3: Multimedia environmental fate and/or exposure assessment of prioritised contaminants
- 3.1 Existing multimedia environmental fate models with or without exposure assessment
- 3.2 Selection of contaminants
- 3.3 Need for development
- 4: Multimedia environmental fate assessment framework: outline, atmospheric modelling and spatial differentiation
- Publisher Summary
- 4.1 Dispersion in air and air to ground interface
- 4.2 General description of the soil and water environmental fate model
- 4.3 Spatial differentiation of the terrestrial and freshwater environment
- 4.4 Implementation
- 5: Modelling the environmental fate in the terrestrial environment
- Publisher Summary
- 5.1 Environmental fate modelling for different land covers
- 5.2 Environmental fate modelling for terrestrial plants
- 6: Modelling the environmental fate in the aquatic environment
- Publisher Summary
- 6.1 Environmental fate modelling of water bodies
- 6.2 Environmental fate modelling for aquatic organisms
- 7: Exposure and impact assessment
- Publisher Summary
- 7.1 Concentration in food
- 7.2 Trade of food, consumption and the effective Intake Fraction
- 7.3 Impact assessment
- 8: Valuation
- Publisher Summary
- 8.1 Temporal aspects of monetary valuation and discounting
- 8.2 Applied concepts for economic valuation and values used
- 9: Evaluation of results
- Publisher Summary
- 9.1 Terminology
- 9.2 Approaches for the evaluation of results
- 9.3 Followed approach
- 9.4 Concluding remarks on the evaluation of results
- 10: Case studies on emissions from single facilities
- Publisher Summary
- 10.1 Definition of marginal emission-related case studies
- 10.2 Impacts due to inhalation exposure
- 10.3 Impacts due to ingestion exposure
- 11: Whole economy case study
- Publisher Summary
- 11.1 Pan-European emission scenario for 1990
- 11.2 Tentative historic emission scenario and contamination increase in time
- 11.3 Impacts due to inhalation exposure
- 11.4 Impacts due to ingestion exposure
- 12: Concluding remarks
- Publisher Summary
- 12.1 The assessment framework
- 12.2 General limitations of the assessment
- 12.3 Application of the assessment framework
- 12.4 Applicability of the approach to other contexts
- 12.5 Outlook and closure
- References
- Appendix A: Model formulation
- A.1 Overall modelling approach of the environmental fate model
- A.2 Partitioning of substances and equilibrium distribution coefficients
- A.3 Environmental fate process formulations
- A.4 Volume calculations
- A.5 Background concentration calculation
- A.6 Exogenous input formulations
- A.7 Exposure assessment
- A.8 Impact assessment
- A.9 Monetary valuation
- Appendix B: Substance-independent data
- B.1 Defining the geographical scope of the model
- B.2 Spatial differentiation into zones
- B.3 Distinction of different compartments
- B.4 Dimensions and spatially invariant properties of freshwater compartments
- B.5 Computation of spatially-resolved compartment properties and process rates
- B.6 Spatial differentiation for the exposure and impact assessment
- Appendix C: Substance-dependent data
- C.1 Substance properties influencing the environmental fate
- C.2 Substance properties influencing the exposure
- C.3 Monitoring data on media and food concentrations
- Appendix D: Symbols, indices and compartment acronyms used for parameter and process description
- Index
- Edition: 1
- Volume: 8
- Published: January 19, 2006
- No. of pages (Hardback): 612
- No. of pages (eBook): 612
- Imprint: Elsevier Science
- Language: English
- Hardback ISBN: 9780444522184
- eBook ISBN: 9780080462523
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