ChEMS Seminar: Rapid Assessment of Life Cycle Environmental and Human Health Impacts of Chemicals

Abstract: Chemicals are incorporated in various products of our daily needs providing vital services for human well-being. Chemicals, however, may create adverse impacts to humans and the environment when used in the absence of proper understandings of their risks. There are over 100 million chemicals registered in the Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) registry, and about 15,000 chemicals are newly registered every day. In principle, life cycle assessment (LCA) should be able to provide the necessary information to evaluate chemical’s environmental and human health impacts. However, the speed at which traditional LCA is conducted cannot keep up with the pace at which new chemicals are developed. The Chemical Life Cycle Collaborative (CLiCC) Program, a university-industry partnership, aims to develop a flexible and extensible tool to evaluate chemical’s life cycle impacts on humans and the environment. The tool follows three basic principles: (1) guaranteed output, (2) preferential input data hierarchy and (3) quantitative uncertainty characterization for all outputs. Following these principles, the CLiCC tool is designed to accommodate a wide spectrum of data availability scenarios. In most cases, therefore, users are able to generate a result even with limited input data, while they should carefully examine the usefulness of the model output taking accompanied uncertainty information into account. If necessary and desired, users can further improve the quality of the results by selectively targeting the key inputs that contributed significantly to the overall uncertainty. Under this framework, users can significantly reduce the amount of resources needed to arrive at the desired quality of information. The tool currently comprises 10 interconnected modules including (1) chemical identity disambiguation and structure, (2) background life cycle inventory database, (3) artificial neural network (ANN), (4) chemical process design, (5) fate and transport, (6) risk assessment, (7) chemical release, (8) quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) on chemical properties, (9) QSAR on toxicity and (10) display of outputs. These modules can be used independently or in combination with others. In order to allow a rapid computation in the absence of abundant input data, the tool capitalizes on various pattern recognition and approximation algorithms, as well as representational state transfer (RESTful) techniques for accessing distributed online resources in real time. The tool also allows customizing the environment for location-specific fate and transport simulations. In this seminar, the method and data used for a few core modules of the tool and its applications will be presented.

Bio: Sangwon Suh is a professor in industrial ecology at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara and director of the CLiCC Program, an EPA-funded university-industry partnership that develops a tool for rapid assessment of chemical’s environmental and human health impacts. He was trained as an environmental engineer and earned his doctorate in industrial ecology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Suh’s research focuses on the sustainability of the human-nature complexity through understanding materials and energy exchanges between them. Over the past 20 years, he has contributed to the theoretical foundations and practical applications of life cycle assessment (LCA) and industrial ecology. Suh was appointed as a member of the International Resource Panel (IRP) by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and served as the Coordinating Lead Author of the Assessment Report 5 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He received the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship from the University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents, the Leontief Memorial Prize and the Richard Stone Prize from the International Input-Output Association (IIOA), the Robert A. Laudise Medal from the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) and a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Bren school.

Host: Julie Schoenung