PARENT SESSION
3B General and multipurpose analysis
9:00 AM to 7:00 PM, Tuesday, 08 May 2001

(T/EH118) Data Management in a Screening Method for Persistent, Bioaccumulative and Toxic Chemicals.

Maeder, Valerie¹, Scheringer, Martin¹, Koller, Guntram^1,2, Hungerbuehler, Konrad¹, ^{1 2}

ABSTRACT- Persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) chemicals are explicitly addressed in the chemicals regulation in North America and are considered relevant by European chemical assessment methods as well. There are several methods for identifying and ranking PBT chemicals. In this project, we compare the criteria defining the PBT scores of a chemical in existing methods and develop a new PBT screening method based on an automated tool for data compilation and handling (Koller G., U. Fischer, K. Hungerbuehler, Industrial Engineering & Chemistry Research, 39 (2000): 960–972). We investigate four endpoints, persistence, bioaccumulation, toxicity, and spatial range, for a set of more than 100 non-polar organic chemicals. Input data are degradation rates, partitioning coefficients, bioconcentration factors and acute and chronic toxicity values. Because of the great number of substances, the manual input of data has to be minimized. Therefore, we use an internal database for gathering the data about the chemicals to be analyzed (Koller G., U. Fischer, K. Hungerbuehler, Industrial Engineering & Chemistry Research, 39 (2000): 960–972). The data are imported automatically from primary databases such as IUCLID (International Uniform Chemical Information Database). Often there are several values from different sources for the same property, e.g. toxicity values (Koller G., K. Fent, K. Hungerbuehler, Environmental Science & Pollution Research, 7 (2000): 135–143). In such cases, the automatic data processing programmed in the internal database determines statistical parameters (e.g. geometric mean) from different values; the list of original data is stored as well. With the variability of the data documented in the database, the next step is to implement algorithms that propagate the variability and uncertainty of the input data to the final PBT values.

Key words: data handling, screening method, PBT chemicals, database