Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
J Hazard Mater. 2010 Jun 15;178(1-3):49-56. doi: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2010.01.041. Epub 2010 Jan 15.
The U.S. EPA Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) represents an extensive, publicly available dataset on toxics and, as such, has contributed to reducing the releases and disposal of toxic chemicals. The TRI, however, reports on a wide range of releases from different sources, some of which are less likely to generate a human or ecological hazard. Furthermore, the TRI is quantity based and does not take into account the relative toxicity of chemicals. In an effort to utilize the TRI more effectively to guide environmental management and policy, this work provides an in-depth analysis of the quantity-based TRI data for year 2007 at industry sector, state, and chemical levels and couples it with toxicity potentials. These toxicity potentials are derived from the U.S. EPA's TRACI (Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and other environmental Impacts) characterization factors for cancer, non-cancer and ecotoxicity. The combination of quantity-based and toxicity-based analysis allows a more robust evaluation of toxics use and priorities. Results show, for instance, that none of the highest priority chemicals identified through the toxicity-based evaluation would have been identified if only quantity-based evaluation had been used. As the chemicals are aggregated to the state and industry sector levels, the discrepancies between the evaluation methods are less significant.
美国环保署有毒物质释放清单（TRI）是一个广泛的、公开可用的有毒物质数据集，它为减少有毒化学物质的释放和处置做出了贡献。然而，TRI 报告了来自不同来源的广泛的释放情况，其中一些不太可能对人类或生态造成危害。此外，TRI 是基于数量的，并没有考虑到化学物质的相对毒性。为了更有效地利用 TRI 来指导环境管理和政策，本工作对 2007 年行业部门、州和化学物质层面的基于数量的 TRI 数据进行了深入分析，并将其与毒性潜力相结合。这些毒性潜力是从美国环保署的 TRACI（化学品和其他环境影响的减少和评估工具）致癌、非致癌和生态毒性特征化因子中得出的。基于数量和基于毒性的分析相结合，可以更有效地评估有毒物质的使用和优先级。结果表明，例如，如果仅使用基于数量的评估，通过基于毒性的评估确定的优先级最高的化学物质中，没有一种会被识别出来。随着化学物质被汇总到州和行业部门层面，评估方法之间的差异不那么显著。
