An analytical treatment of potential hazard and risk assessment for environmental chemicals

摘要

An analytical framework for the assessment of environmental impacts of chemical waste is developed. Methods are suggested for a stepwise procedure leading from hazard assessment to exposure assessment to risk assessment. It is shown, based on some simpifying assumptions, regarding hazardous-waste sites, that dose-response modeling with and without threshold effects leads to a comparison of “hazard potentials” of waste sites correlated with a qualitative order of risk on a class of outcome-event pairs. The suggested methodology appears to satisfy basic constraints on environmental risk assessment.