Risk assessment, anionic surfactants

The assessment of whether a substance presents a risk to the receiving environmental compartment is based on a comparison of the measured or predicted environmental concentration (PEC) of the chemical of concern with the predicted no effect concentration (PNEC) to organisms in the ecosystem. This is briefly discussed in Chapter 7.4. Studies carried out so far, e.g. by Vandepitte and Feijtel [91], show that the risk of anionic surfactants such as LAS, AE and AES for the aquatic environment is low, since the PECs are always lower than the maximum permissible concentrations. 

Risk assessments for anionic surfactants are obtained by comparing environmental exposure concentrations to effect levels (the quotient method). A protection factor that reflects the environmental safety of the material is calculated by dividing the exposure level by the effect concentration. If the protection factor is greater than 1, the material is deemed safe. Although this approach to assessing risk yields a numerical value that could be interpreted as the relative safety of a compound, comparisons of protection factors for different compounds should be avoided. The risk assessment for each material must be considered separately because of differences in chemical properties and differences in the database used to obtain the protection factor. In addition, the degree of uncertainty in the exposure and effect... 

---