Autores
Rubén Irusta Mata, Sheyla Ortiz de García, Pedro Antonio García Encina
Fecha de publicación
2016
Editor
Académie Nationale de Pharmacie
Descripción
In the last years pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) have been found at different level of concentrations in all environmental compartment (air, water and soil), and many of their impacts are still unknown or they are under analysis. One tool used for estimated the potential impact of PPCPs in the environment is the life cycle assessment (LCA). PPCPs are being increasingly included in LCAs since they have evidenced ecological and human adverse effects and due to their presence in different environmental compartments, wastewater facilities and industry. In environmental LCAs, CFs (alternatively referred to as equivalency factors) are used to determine the relative importance of a substance to toxicity related impact categories, such as human toxicity and freshwater ecotoxicity (Huijbregts et al. 2005a). In this sense, the USEtoxTM model is a powerful tool to calculate CFs. It is an environmental model for characterization of human and ecotoxicological impacts in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) and comparative risk assessment (Huijbregts et al., 2010a). Despite the large number of substances which have been considered in the USEtoxTM database (more than 3000 in the USEtoxTM organic database 1.01) a small amount of PPCPs have been considered (approximately less than 2% of the organic database corresponds to this group of compounds). Accordingly, the CFs of many PPCPs have not been calculated. Therefore, the main goal of this research was to estimate CFs of 27 PPCPs widely used worldwide for incorporating these values in LCIA studies or to generate impact score rankings. USEtoxTM software was used …