Initiators environmental assessment

Environment Canada Initial Environmental Assessment At Environment Canada, A discussion paper with recommendations Report EPS 8IFA/1, Canada, 1987. 

The EPS (environmental priority strategies in product design) system was initiated in 1989 by Volvo Automotive Company, IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute and the Swedish Industry Federation. The current version was developed at the Centre for Environmental Assessment of Product and Material Systems (CPM) [37, 38],... 

Initial environmental fate and effect analysis Physicochemical properties and fate assessment... 

The next step under the act is DOE s initial nomination of five locations for site characterization, based on a consideration of the guidelines and the environmental assessments to be prepared for each of the five nominated sites, followed by a recommendation of three candidate sites to the President for his approval. The DOE had intended to complete these actions in the summer of 1983 in order to permit the conduct of a sufficiently thorough site characterization program at each site to support the presidential recommendation of a site for the first repository by March 31,1987, as required by the act. The act requires that for each site under consideration, DOE conduct public hearings to solicit recommendations on issues to be addressed in the environmental assessment and in any site characterization plan to be used if the site is approved by the President. The specific date and location for these hearings will be established after consultation with state representatives. 

Maki, A.W. (1991) The Exxon Valdez oil spill initial environmental impact assessment. Environ. Sci. Technol., 25, 24. 

Existing site information very likely comes from the initial site assessment or phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) done for that site. A phase I ESA normally includes a site inspection, a review of the relevant data, interviews, and a written report. When a phase II ESA is performed, more existing site information is obtained. A phase II contains (limited) soil sampling, done to determine the soil contaminants, or to determine the soil quality on- and off-site. Phase II ESAs have written reports including recommendations and have the extent of contamination delineated. 

A key component in the initial site assessment is the identification of human and environmental receptors potentially impacted by the site. An exposure pathway analysis relies on transport information to identify receptor or exposure points. For example, potentially significant transport and exposure pathways may include groundwater transport, vapor migration into buildings or utilities, etc. Current and potential future land use is identified as well as the potential for future installation of groundwater drinking water wells. If surface water has been impacted by the release, then appropriate surface-water exposure pathways will be identified. 

A tiered approach is used for pesticide exposure assessment at the surface water level. Depending on the results of the initial risk assessment, more extensive testing relative to the environmental exposure or hazard may be required to define the full environmental risk. The data are generated from such increasingly comprehensive series of studies (higher tiered studies). At each tier a comparison has to take place between the estimated exposure and... 

The Danish minister of environment in 1988 announced that within a few years the manufacture and use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) products had to be reduced as much as technically and economically possible due to their environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal. This preventive environmental policy was mainly based on the emission of hydrogen chloride and dioxins from waste incineration. A study of the technical, economic, and environmental consequences of a substitution was initiated by the National Agency of Environmental Protection. The goal was to collect background data for the upcoming negotiations between the environmental authorities and PVC-industry and manufacturers of PVC products in Denmark. The environmental assessment focused on PVC and 11 alternative materials, such as polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephtalate (PET), polystyrene (PS), polyurethane (PUR), synthetic rubbers (EPDM, CR and SBR), paper, impregnated wood, and aluminum. ... 

This model can describe the environmental fate and exposure of a given chemical by the user specifying nationwide or regional environments consisting of air, water, soil and sediment phases. MNSEM requires data on the chemical, environments, and releases, as shown in Table 7.1. Annually-averaged environmental data are usually used for the initial environmental fate and exposure assessment of chemicals. However, reliability of model application would impair considerably, when predicted environmental fate and exposure are significantly different from those observed in the real environment. 

Default operational intervention levels should be calculated in advance for the various types of releases that could occur. These default values would be used initially to assess environmental data. Some of the IAEA default OILs for a nuclear power plant release are shown in Table 9.12. As soon as possible, operational intervention levels should be recalculated based on the actual composition of the release and these values should replace the default operational intervention levels if appropriate. Examples of the detailed procedures used to calculate operational intervention levels are provided in (IAEA, 1997b). This reference also provides generic operational intervention levels for a nuclear power plant release and the IAEA generic intervention levels. 

Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office Guidelines Order, June 1984 Duffy, P.J.B. (Editor), Initial Assessment Guide, Federal Environmental Assessment and Review Process, Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office, Ottawa, Ontario, April 1986. 

The extent of data to be generated on an active substance used in biocides is dependent on the route of the exposure of the chemical to the environment, the environmental compartments of concern and the need to refine/reduce the assessment factors after the initial risk assessment has been conducted and this will be discussed in more detail below. 

In conclusion, we suggest that when a new chemical or series of chemicals, such as the chlorinated dibenzofurans become the subject of environmental assessments it is important to obtain, correlate and interpret their physical-chemical property data using the approach suggested here. As more reliable experimental data become available, more refined property-structure relationships can bedeveloped including isomer differences, but a necessary first stage is to establish reliable initial estimates of three key solubilities . Much useful environmental fate information can be deduced from these data, indeed it is difficult to conceive how reliable environmental fate information can be obtained or interpreted without such data. 

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