Substance prioritisation for the development of EU Acute Exposure Toxicity Thresholds (AETLs)

This paper describes: the selection of 21 preliminary substances to use as case studies in the development and testing of the AETL's methodology; and the development of a prioritisation methodology to inform initial substance selection for a possible further AETLs program. The work was based on consultation with experts drawn from EU major stakeholder groups. It included a Validation Exercise working with three Member States, which account for between approximately 40% and 50% of all EU Seveso II sites. From this Validation Exercise we infer that, if these three Member States are representative in terms of numbers of priority substances, then the number of EU higher priority substances for further AETLs development is unlikely to be much in excess of 50.