Toxicity, general basic considerations

PNECs themselves are preferentially extrapolated from chronic toxicity data or, if no long-term data are available, acute toxicity data [51] they generally refer to algae, daphnia or fish toxicity. Sanderson et al., Stuer-Lauridsen et al., Boillot and Ferrari et al. [108-111] have reported PNECs for a large list of PhCs, and [49,112] recently proposed a model for the predicting PNEC of a substance, taking into consideration its acidic or basic behaviour in the environment. This procedure... 

Nonetheless, a (partial) switch to renewables is desirable for other reasons, such as biocompatibility, biodegradability and lower toxicity, i.e. renewable raw materials leave a smaller environmental footprint [3]. That the chemical industry has been slow to make the transition, in the three decades following the Report of the Club of Rome, is a consequence of the fact that oil and natural gas are excellent basic feedstocks and highly atom efficient, low waste, catalytic procedures are available for their conversion into commodity chemicals. The same cannot be said for the fine chemicals industry where processes are, generally speaking, much less efficient in many respects and there is considerable room for improvement. 

After some basic concepts and definitions (Chapter 2), a general toxicity approach for plastics and rubbers is presented in Chapter 3. This discusses the general toxicity issue for plastics and rubbers due to additives (in the same chapter), followed by a consideration of health effects due to the polymers and other main ingredients (except additives), in the following chapter. 

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