The precautionary principle and environmental persistence: prioritizing the decision-making process

There is continuing activity among regulatory bodies to assess and prioritize chemicals used in commerce based on their potential to be persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic (PBT). Reliable data needed to perform a PBT hazard or risk assessment, however, may not always be readily available. Consequently concern may arise regarding the potential for false positives and false negatives to be wrongly classified. In order to more effectively classify substances, adequate time is needed to acquire the necessary data to support the overall PBT assessment. Of particular interest is the question of whether or not restrictions on the use and manufacture of a substance can be delayed to allow time to conduct the necessary field and laboratory studies of a particular substance? To address this question it is demonstrated that chemical partitioning property and environmental persistence information can be effectively combined to provide guidance for regulatory priority setting. Specifically, it is argued that substances that have media specific half-life values that exceed the regulatory threshold value for persistence under the EU chemicals REACH program, for example, are more likely to have a ‘legacy’ associated with their use when the log KOA > 8, and when they are emitted to air or soil. Thus, precautionary actions limiting the use and manufacture of the substance may be warranted. Whereas substances emitted to air with log KOA < 6 and log KAW > −2 are less likely to have a ‘legacy’ associated with their use. Thus precautionary actions in the absence of data may not be warranted.