Sustainability indicators for end-of-life chemical releases and potential exposure

Understanding the chemical risk to environment and human health is an important issue when a waste management strategy and a control risk system are analyzed and selected. This is even more important at the end-of-life (recycling, recovery and disposal) scenario for a chemical due to the uncertainty in respect of the most susceptible receptors (e.g. workers), pathways (e.g. groundwater), routes (e.g. inhalation) and hazard (e.g. cancer) associated to a chemical exposure. Hence, selecting a group of sustainability performance indicators for estimating the chemical risk when evaluating end-of-life scenarios is a crucial task. Therefore, this manuscript focuses on a critical analysis of the sustainability indicators taxonomy which are used to assess chemical risk to the environment and human health during end-of-life scenarios. The insights from performing an extensive literature search in the largest database of peer-reviewed literature provide that chemical intake, hazard quotient, hazard index, and carcinogenic risk have been the most commonly used for human health chemical risk. In addition, previous research has been less focused on environment chemical risk, with ecological risk index being the most widely used indicator thus for. The most employed human health chemical risk sustainability indicators are part of a methodology suggested by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for chemical risk assessment.