Life cycle thinking in waste management: summary of European Commission's Malta 2005 workshop and pilot studies.

Life cycle thinking is essential to consider the implications of different waste management systems beyond their traditional regional boundaries. Building on data provided by representatives of Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, the European Commission's DG JRC conducted a series of life cycle pilot studies in the context of municipal waste management. The results were presented in a JRC workshop in Malta, where the government representatives also outlined their national strategies focusing on the main related achievements.

Multimedia fate and human intake modeling: spatial versus nonspatial insights for chemical emissions in Western Europe.

Multimedia fate and multipathway human exposure models are widely adopted in assessments of toxicological risks of chemical emissions at the regional scale. This paper addresses the question of how much spatial detail is necessary in such models when estimating the intake by the entire population in large, heterogeneous regions such as Europe. The paper presents a spatially resolved multimedia fate and multipathway exposure model for Western Europe, available as IMPACT 2002.

Aquatic ecotoxicological indicators in life-cycle assessment.

This paper compares available options for the aquatic ecotoxicological effect factor component in life-cycle assessment (LCA). The effect factor is expressed here as the change in risk per unit change in cumulative exposure, delta effect/delta exposure. The comparison is restricted to approaches linked, implicitly as well as explicitly, to species-sensitivity distributions (SSDs).

Extrapolating ecotoxicological measures from small data sets.

Risk screening is commonly conducted using multiple-species ecotoxicological measures such as the HC5, the hazardous concentration at which 5% of species in a specified (eco-)system are assumed to be stressed. This article demonstrates that the estimate of HC5 will not vary significantly among commonly adopted parametric models of species sensitivity distributions. Uncertainty is highly dependent on the number of species tested (sample size) and the relevance of the measurement to the assessment endpoint (e.