Chemicals in the Environment: Assessing and Managing Risk (Issues in Environmental Science and Technology, Volume 22) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0854042067 ISBN 13: 9780854042067

Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2006

Synopsis

Rising concern in recent years over the possible adverse environmental consequences of the use of chemicals has led to a steady increase in national activity towards greater regulation, as well as voluntary agreements with manufacturers for risk management of certain products. This book begins by reviewing the current framework of legislation for the regulation of chemicals in the UK and then reports expert views on both the current situation and possible future developments. Subsequent chapters consider some of the scientific and technical issues, including the evaluation of the risks which chemicals can pose to human life and the environment, and the problems relating to evaluating the risks associated with metals in the environment. Finally, the predictive methods used to model the behaviour of organic chemicals within the environment are described. Highly topical, and with authoritative contributions from international experts, this book covers both the scientific underpinning and the legislative and practical issues of this emotive subject. The detailed coverage of a topic that affects many sectors of industry and society will make it popular with a wide audience of individuals from government organisations, industry or academic research, particularly those in environmental chemistry sectors.

About this title

About the Authors

Roy Harrison OBE is Queen Elizabeth II Birmingham Centenary Professor of Environmental Health at the University of Birmingham. In 2004 he was appointed OBE for services to environmental science. Professor Harrison’s research interests lie in the field of environment and human health. His main specialism is in air pollution, from emissions through atmospheric chemical and physical transformations to exposure and effects on human health. Much of this work is designed to inform the development of policy.

Ron Hester is an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of York. In addition to his research work on a wide range of applications of vibrational spectroscopy, he has been actively involved in environmental chemistry and was a founder member of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Environment Group. His current activities are mainly as an editor and as an external examiner and assessor on courses, individual promotions, and departmental/subject area evaluations both in the UK and abroad.

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Chemicals in the Environment

Assessing and Managing Risk

By R.E. Hester, R.M. Harrison

The Royal Society of Chemistry

Copyright © 2006 The Royal Society of Chemistry
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85404-206-7

Contents

The Current Regulation of Environmental Chemicals John Garrod, 1, 
Chemicals Risk Assessment and Management Elliot G. Finer, 21, 
Future Perspectives in Risk Assessment of Chemicals Peter Floyd, 45, 
Assessing Risks to Human Health Paul T.C. Harrison and Philip Holmes, 65, 
Environmental Risk Assessment Lorraine Maltby, 84, 
Risk Assessment of Metals in the Environment Peter G.C. Campbell, Peter M. Chapman and Beverley A. Hale, 102, 
Partitioning, Persistence and Long-Range Transport of Chemicals in the Environment Donald Mackay Eva Webster and Todd, 132, 
Subject Index, 154, 

CHAPTER 1

The Current Regulation of Environmental Chemicals

JOHN GARROD

Introduction

Man-made chemicals and naturally occurring chemicals used in industrial processes or in consumer products may enter the environment at any or all stages of their life cycle from the stage of production/manufacture through formulation and use and including disposal of a used product. The potential for harm to be caused to the environment or to human health via the environment will be dependent on the basic physico-chemical and toxic properties of the chemical, the amount that enters the environment and its distribution between different environmental compartments. The physical properties of a chemical will also determine whether the route of entry is likely to be via air, water or to the terrestrial environment.

The scope of this chapter is largely restricted to industrial chemicals that are not subject to a positive approval system, for example, pesticides, biocides and veterinary medicines, but these may be briefly touched on where appropriate. It will also be restricted to considering the regulation of impacts of chemicals on the environment and on human health via the environment. A consideration of the protection of humans in the work place is also not included.

It is proposed to consider both legal and other frameworks that have been put in place to prevent harm to the environment or to human health via the environment that arises out of the production, use or disposal of hazardous chemicals. Much legislation has been introduced to prevent damage occurring to the environment and human health from chemicals but other approaches including voluntary approaches from government and industry have been adopted.

2 Protection of the Water Environment

Many chemical production facilities have been located historically adjacent to rivers and estuaries frequently to allow ready extraction of water and raw materials (e.g. salt) for industrial processes and for the discharge of waste effluent to the receiving water posing a potential risk to the aquatic environment. The chemical industry has been very successful and thousands of products used in a multitude of commercial and consumer products have been developed and marketed around the world. The UK has become a major player in the international chemical industry. In the past, it was often the case that many chemical production facilities discharged poorly or even untreated waste streams to fresh or marine water bodies resulting in extensive damage to the water quality and resulting in harm to aquatic organisms. In some cases, effluents are discharged directly into the sewage system and pass through a sewage treatment works (STW) before entry into a river or the marine environment. This had the potential to cause harm to the treatment plant itself or for inadequate degradation of the chemical before entering into the receiving water body.

21 Control of Chemical Discharges to the Environment

The regulation or control of dangerous chemicals or substances to the environment, particularly to water, from industrial plants or STW has been implemented by various pieces of legislation derived from the Dangerous Substances Directive (76/464/EEC) and Daughter Directives, The Environmental Protection Act (EPA)1990 and the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive (96/61/EEC). More recently, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) has been introduced to regulate the quality of all water resources in the European Union (EU).

Directive (76/464/EEC) was implemented to control discharges of dangerous substances to inland surface waters, territorial waters, inland coastal waters and ground water. Chemicals identified as the most hazardous to the aquatic environment are in list 1 of the Directive and the legislation requires that these chemicals be completely eliminated from discharges to water. The chemicals in this list are toxic and persist in the environment and accumulate in biological systems causing harm to aquatic life. Dangerous substances in list 2 were thought to be less hazardous than those in list 1. Chemicals in list 2 have an Environmental Quality Standard (EQS) set according to a standard methodology. EQSs represent a concentration limit that must not be exceeded in any controlled water in the UK and the dangerous substance is not believed to be harmful to the aquatic environment at concentrations below this limit.

Where there are uncertainties arising from lack of information, for instance on salt water organisms, larger safety factors are used for the derivation of the EQS. The standards apply to the receiving water and not to the discharge itself. These are statutory standards and the environment agencies (i.e. the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and Environment and Heritage Service, Northern Ireland) have a legal obligation to ensure that they are met. Where special areas for conservation are concerned, the relevant enforcing agency should examine whether an EQS is sufficient to protect the species at the site. The adequacy of EQSs for substances in list 2 has been addressed by Grimwood and Dixon (1997).

Regulatory monitoring for EQS compliance will be carried out at sites from industrial plants and STW where there is the possibility that the discharge effluent will contain dangerous substances. All major rivers will also have background monitoring sites just upstream of their tidal limits, the so-called National Network monitoring sites in the UK.

Discharges to controlled waters from STWs and industrial sites will also be monitored for compliance with their consents to discharge dangerous substances. These consents set limits for individual substance concentrations to ensure that the concentrations in the watercourse downstream do not exceed the EQS.

In 1980 the protection of groundwater was taken out of directive 76/464/EEC and regulated under the separate Council Directive 80/68/EEC on the protection of groundwater against pollution caused by certain dangerous substances.

Broader thinking to address European water policy was addressed in 1988 at the Frankfurt Ministerial seminar on water which resulted in a series of directives after the 1976 Dangerous Substances Directive to fill gaps identified in the existing regulations. This resulted in the introduction of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, the Nitrates Directive in 1991, a Directive for IPPC in 1996 and a new Drinking Water Directive in 1998.

1.2 Water Framework Directive (WFD)

Pressure from the EU Council and the European Parliament to consider water in a more holistic way led to a new European Water Policy, which was developed with extensive consultation with a broad group of stakeholders. The outcome was an agreed way forward for a single piece of legislation to bring together the fragmented pieces of legislation on protecting water. The Commission presented a proposal for a WFD with broad aims. This resulted in a proposal for a single system of management for river basins representing natural features of the hydrological landscape.

Some river basins will cross national boundaries but a 'river basin management plan' will be required and updated every 6 years. With regard to chemical protection, a general requirement for 'good chemical status' was introduced to cover all surface waters. This is defined in terms of compliance with all the quality standards established for chemical substances at European level. The Directive allows for updating existing standards and introducing new ones for priority hazardous substances.

Directive 76/464/EEC will be integrated into the WFD (2000/60/EC). This is a new piece of substantial legislation, which introduces a new integrated approach to the protection of Europe's rivers, lakes, estuaries, coastal waters and groundwater from deterioration and seeks to improve and sustain their quality. The Directive requires all inland and coastal waters to reach 'good status' by 2015. It aims to achieve this through identifying river basins and demanding environmental quality objectives to be set including ecological targets for surface waters.

With regard to dangerous substances, there are transition arrangements from the 1976 Directive. The list 1 of dangerous substances was repealed with the entry in force of the WFD and has been replaced by a List of Priority Substances. Other provisions of the earlier directive, including the reduction of emissions of dangerous substances to controlled waters will continue in place until 2013. The WFD was transposed in the UK through a series of regulations including the Water Environment (WFD) (England and Wales) Regulations 2003 and others for specific river basins.

Within the WFD there is also an element of 'good ecological status' which considers the biological, hydrological and chemical characteristics of the catchment area. The biological characteristics will clearly vary from region to region but this is approached by considering what the biology of any particular area would expected to look like in the absence of minimal human impacts although this is not a simple exercise due to the wide range of ecological variability.

In dealing with groundwater, the WFD presumes that the water body should not be polluted at all being a potential source of water for drinking. For that reason, the approach is to prohibit the discharge of any potential pollutant to groundwater and at the same time carry out monitoring to determine ingress of chemicals from indirect sources and take remedial action where necessary.

The new Directive essentially seeks to combine the two aspects of previous legislation that have sought on the one hand to control the entry of hazardous substances into water bodies and on the other to set quality objectives for the receiving environment. It will rationalise the EU's regulations on water by replacing seven existing directives, those on surface water and the related directives on measurement methods, sampling strategies and information requirements on fresh water quality, the fish water, shellfish water and groundwater directives and the directive on dangerous-substance discharges.

2.3 Pollution Prevention and Control Regulations

Pollution from industrial installations is controlled under rules set out in the EC Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive of 1996 (96/61/EC) and this was introduced into England and Wales through the Pollution Prevention and Control(PPC) Regulations 2000 and other instruments in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The PPC regulations will replace the pollution control regime set up under Part 1 of the EPA 1990 and the transition is due to be completed by 2007.

The EPA introduced to the UK the concepts of Integrated Pollution Control (IPC), which aimed to control releases of hazardous substances to all environmental media, air, land and water and Local Air Pollution Control (LAPC), which controlled releases to air only. The act requires the authorisation to operate the relevant 'prescribed' industrial process from the appropriate regulatory body. Local Councils have responsibility for authorising prescribed processes that emit pollutants to air only (Part B processes) and the Environment Agency or the Scottish Environment Protection Agency authorise processes that may emit pollutants to air, land or water.

In April 2000, Part IIA of the EPA came into force and this introduced a new regime for the regulation of contaminated land. The main purpose is to make provision for the identification of land that poses unacceptable risks to the environment or human health from polluting chemicals and to enforce remediation where the risks cannot be reduced by other means.

The PPC Regulations 2000 introduce three linked systems for pollution control. These relate to the potential of the industrial site or installation to pollute the environment and are graded A (1) (highest) through A (2) to Part B (lowest). A1 sites are regulated by the Environment Agency and A2 and Part B installations are regulated by local authorities.

A (1) installations are subject to IPPC, A (2) installations to Local Authority IPPC (LA-IPPC) and B processes to LA- PPC. All three systems require the operators of the installations to obtain a permit to operate.

IPPC and LA-IPPC introduce an integrated environmental approach to the control of certain industrial processes. The IPPC Directive seeks to achieve a high level of environmental protection and to prevent or reduce to an acceptable level emissions to the environment. A guiding principle under the PPC regulations is the use of 'Best Available Techniques' (BAT), which is designed to balance the cost of compliance to the operator against the benefits to the environment. The PPC regulations increase the scope of control above the EPA regime to cover energy efficiency, site restoration, accident prevention, noise, odour, waste minimisation and heat and vibrations and they cover a wider range of activities to include food and drink manufacturers, intensive live-stock production and landfill sites. LA regulated Part B installations extend only to emissions to air but BAT also applies.

Guidance documents have been published on the PPC regulations to help installation operators to understand and meet the requirements.

2.4 Direct Toxicity Assessment

The control of point source discharges by the regulatory agencies has been predominantly through the consents procedure for individual substances. This procedure is set out in Schedule 10 of the Water Resources Act 1991. A consent may be issued subject to certain conditions dependent on the location of the discharge, the design and construction of the outlet, the composition and quantity of the effluent and sampling requirements.

However, there are some industrial discharges which contain a mixture of components creating a complex effluent that is entering the receiving water. These circumstances place difficulties on setting an appropriate consent for the whole effluent. The difficulties may arise through the potential high cost of analysis of all of the chemical components, scarce data for ecotoxicological end points for many substances and the difficulty in predicting how chemicals will behave in complex combinations. Such a situation calls for an alternative approach to assess the toxicity of the whole effluent and this approach is termed Direct Toxicty Assessment (DTA). To improve the assessment and control of complex effluents, the UK through the Environment Agency and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has been developing an approach for DTA.

The DTA approach will use a suite of well-established toxicity tests on algae, invertebrates and, where necessary, fish which can be used as a direct assessment of the biological quality of an effluent or environmental compartment such as the water column or sediment. The testing methods will also permit the identification of toxic waste streams discharging to a watercourse or to sewer and their source within a production facility. In some cases toxicity tests are already used for licensing of discharges and DTA has important implications for regulation as a component of IPC. The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has issued a Technical Guidance Manual for DTA for licensing discharges to water.

The assessment and control of effluent toxicity currently relates to acute toxicity only. It is acknowledged that the approach could be extended to the assessment of chronic toxicity and endocrine disrupting effects. The combined use of biological effects measures, which includes the use of biomarkers, substance-specific assessment and biological surveillance will provide a robust system for identifying, characterising and controlling the effects of hazardous chemicals on the environment.

3 Classification and Labelling of Chemicals

In the 1960s, the European Economic Community(EEC) recognised a need to provide protection from dangerous substances of human health and in particular workers handling them. This resulted in the publication in 1967 of Directive 67/548/EEC (The Dangerous Substances Directive) relating to the classification, packaging and labelling of dangerous substances and provides another mechanism for managing the risk to the environment and human health from chemicals. The Directive covers all substances and preparations which are placed on the market in Member States of the Community and substances are defined as chemical elements and their compounds either in their natural state or as produced by industry. The original Directive did not require labelling substances as 'dangerous for the environment' but this was introduced with the sixth amendment of the Directive in 1979.

In the UK, the Chemicals (Hazard Information and Packaging for Supply) Regulations (CHIP) implement the Dangerous Substances Directive and later directives including 1999/45/EC relating to dangerous preparations and the Safety Data Sheets Directive (91/155/EEC and related directives). Under CHIP, substances have always required an environmental classification but the latest set of regulations, CHIP 3, which came into force in July 2002, requires both substances and preparations to be labelled if they have the potential to cause harm to the environment. Preparations are defined as mixtures or solutions composed of two or more substances so there may be considerable implications for the new requirement under CHIP 3. The CHIP regulations require those who supply dangerous chemicals to identify the hazards of the chemical, to provide this information to downstream users and customers via the label or in a safety data sheet and to package the chemical safely. In the context of CHIP, 'supply' is used in a broad sense wherever a chemical is supplied to another person and can include retailers, wholesalers, distributors, importers or manufacturers of chemicals.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0854042067
• ISBN 13: 9780854042067
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 174
• Editor: Harrison R M, Hester R E