Environmental issues assessment

The treatment of these issues will be discussed jointly with the health, safety and environment (HSE) departments within the company and with the process and facilities engineers, and their treatment should be designed in conjunction with an environmental impact assessment. Some of the important basic principles for waste management are to ... 

Mercuy Health Effects Update, Health Issue Assessment, EPA-600/8-84-019E, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., 1984. 

Animals may not be moved for 14 days after administration of the experimental product, and records on the disposition of trial animals must be retained for 2 years. Bio-security issues will be of particular concern to the environmental impact assessment where trials involve live organisms or genetically modified organisms, either in vaccine challenge studies or as experimental products. 

In environmental risk assessment, the objective is to establish the likelihood of a chemical (or chemicals) expressing toxicity in the natural environment. Assessment is based on a comparison of ecotoxicity data from laboratory tests with estimated or measured exposure in the field. The question of effects at the level of population that may be the consequence of such toxicity is not addressed. This issue will now be discussed. 

Another issue is the development and refinement of the testing protocols used in mesocosms. Mesocosms could have a more important role in environmental risk assessment if the data coming from them could be better interpreted. The use of biomarker assays to establish toxic effects and, where necessary, relate them to effects produced by chemicals in the field, might be a way forward. The issues raised in this section will be returned to in Chapter 17, after consideration of the individual examples given in Part 2. 

Though it is impossible to anticipate all the directions in which environmental risk assessment will expand during the forthcoming years, below are presented some hot issues that nowadays are already attracting considerable scientific research. 

Nanda, D.R. and B.B. Mishra. 1997. Effect of solid waste from a chlor-alkali factory on rice plants mercury accumulation and changes in biochemical variables. Pages 601-612 in P.N. Cheremisinoff (ed.). Ecological Issues and Environmental Impact Assessment. Gulf Publishing Co., Houston, TX. 

Environmental inflows/outflows, in life cycle assessment, 74 809-810 Environmental interactions, test temperature and, 73 487-488 Environmental interventions, in life cycle assessment, 74 820 Environmental issues. See also Environmental concerns concerning phosphoric acids and phosphates, 73 861 electric furnaces, 72 314 emulsion-related, 70 128 ethylene glycol, 72 653-655 with fermentation, 77 49 in fine art examination/conservation, 77 407 108... 

In the pharmaceutical industry, acute toxicity testing has uses other than for product safety determinations. First, as in other industries, acute toxicity determinations are part of industrial hygiene or occupational health environmental impact assessments (Deichmann and Gerarde, 1969). These requirements demand testing not only for finished products but frequently of intermediates as well. These issues and requirements, however, are discussed in Chapter 2 and are not directly addressed here. 

Chemical Week 1980, 128, pp 25-27. Rogers and Hill, Coal Conversion Comparisons, pp 69-71 Assessment of Technology for the Liquefaction of Coal, pp 111-15 Gulf Oil Corporation Information Brochure, "Solvent Refined Coal-II Environmental Issues and Protection Measures,"... 

One study that has tackled this issue, however, was recently published by de Souza et al. [104], who set up an environmental risk assessment of the 21 intravenous antibiotics most used in an intensive care unit of a hospital in Curitiba (Brazil). They evaluated the RQ, based on PEC, both in the raw effluent and after a dedicated conventional biological treatment. They found that, in the raw effluent from the ward, the environmental risk was high for 15 compounds, medium for 4 and low for 2 similarly, the treated effluent was labelled as high risk in terms of 14 compounds, medium for 5 and low for 2. 

Abstract Active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) represent a group of emerging environmental contaminants. Albeit in trace amounts, they are of great concern since given their continuous introduction into the environment, their impact on ecosystems and human health is of great importance. As a result, the environmental risk assessment (ERA) of medicinal products has to be evaluated and appropriate legislation has been issued in the European Union (EU). 

US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Summary Review of the Health Effects Associated with Phenol Health Issue Assessment, 37pp. Washington, DC, US Government Printing Office, January 1986... 

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