Toxicity design

Risk depends on toxicity, design, and the competence of management at each site. Thus, management is responsible for hardware, work practices, and the selection, training, duties, and... 

Design products to only release benign materials into the environment. This is not easy. For example, both brake pad dust and material from car tires is highly eco-toxic. Design the product for containment or destruction before end of life of any hazardous materials. 

Dilution ventilation Design ventilation systems to control low-level toxics. Design locker rooms with good ventilation and special areas or enclosures for contaminated clothing. Design ventilation to isolate operations from rooms and offices. Design filter press rooms with directional ventilation. 

Lyndon, Mary. 1989. Informational Economics and Chemical Toxicity Designing Laws to Produce and Use Data. Michigan Law Review 87 (June) 1795-1861. 

The goals of preclinical toxicity studies include identifying potential human toxicities, designing tests to further define the toxic mechanisms, and predicting the specific and the most relevant toxicities to be monitored in clinical trials. In addition to the studies shown in Table 5-1, several quantitative estimates are desirable. These include the no-effect dose—the maximum dose at which a specified toxic effect is not seen the minimum lethal dose—the smallest dose that is observed to kill any experimental animal and, if necessary, the median lethal dose (LD50)—the dose that kills... 

Vindimian, E., Garric, J., Flammarion, P., Thybaud, E. and Babut, M. (1999) An index of effluent aquatic toxicity designed by PLS regression, using acute and chronic tests and expert judgements, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 18, 2386-2391. 

We are pleased to acknowledge the support of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, Design for the Environment Program. 

We thank Dr. Paul Anastas, Dr. Carol Bums, Dr. Steve Buelow, and Dr. Dale Spall for helpful discussions. Part of this work was supported by Department of Energy LDRD funding through Los Alamos National Laboratory and another part by the US EPA Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics Design for the Environment Program. 

P-20 Standard for the Classification of Toxic Gas Mixtures. While pure gas toxic designations are well known, this standard is the first to establish a means of classifying the toxicity of gas mixtures in accordance with the definitions of toxic or poison as contained in DOT and Canadian Transportation of Dangerous Goods (TDG) regulations and to coincide with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) values (18 pages). 

Acute toxicity, designated as LD50 (the dose that will kill 50% of the animals in a test series). 

Less hazardous chemical systems should be designed with little or no toxicity Design for commercial aflerhfe through their nontoxic availability... 

Here we shall restrict consideration to safety and health considerations that can be built in while the design is developing rather than the detailed hazard and operability studies that take place in the later stages of design. The three major hazards in process plants are fire, explosion, and toxic release. ... 

In preliminary process design, the primary consideration is contact by inhalation. This happens either through accidental release of toxic material to the atmosphere or the fugitive emissions caused by slow leakage from pipe flanges, valve glands, and pump and compressor seals. Tank filling causes emissions when the rise in liquid level causes vapor in the tank to be released to the atmosphere. 

Nickel carbonyl is volatile, has Htde odor, and is extremely toxic. Symptoms of dangerous exposure may not appear for several days. Effective medical treatment should be started immediately. The plant should be designed to ensure containment of nickel carbonyl and to prevent operator contact. 

Laboratory experiments using rodents, or the use of gas analysis, tend to be confused by the dominant variable of fuel—air ratio as well as important effects of burning configuration, heat input, equipment design, and toxicity criteria used, ie, death vs incapacitation, time to death, lethal concentration, etc (154,155). Some comparisons of polyurethane foam combustion toxicity with and without phosphoms flame retardants show no consistent positive or negative effect. Moreover, data from small-scale tests have doubtful relevance to real fine ha2ards. 

Biorational approaches have proven useful in the development of classes of herbicides which inhibit essential metaboHc pathways common to all plants and thus are specific to plants and have low toxicity to mammalian species. Biorational herbicide development remains a high risk endeavor since promising high activities observed in the laboratory may be nullified by factors such as limitations in plant uptake and translocation, and the instabiHty or inactivity of biochemical en2yme inhibitors under the harsher environmental conditions in the field. Despite these recogni2ed drawbacks, biorational design of herbicides has shown sufficient potential to make the study of herbicide modes of action an important and growing research area. 

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