Source identification and flow analysis (Contact: Eva Eriksson)
Xenobiotic organic compounds and heavy metals are common in our environment, being found in household products, building materials, cars, roads etc. These contaminants have potential to affect environmental water quality. Information regarding quantities present in household chemicals and other products and their release factors are collected. Procedures are developed for screening and ranking of potentially hazardous compounds in the biosphere and technosphere e.g. urban run-off, wastewater and solid waste. The procedures are based on inherent properties of chemicals with persistence, bioaccumulation, and toxicity as the main criteria.
Risk assessment strategies and approaches (Contact: Anders Baun; Steffen Foss Hansen)
The group is active in several technical and chemical risk assessment projects. These are carried out for industrial partners, national and international authorities and the European Union. The content of the projects spans from technical risk assessment of production processes to development and validation of methods of chemical risk assessment in the EU. Batteries of aquatic biotests are applied to environmental samples for identification and ranking of toxicity as a complementary method to traditional analytical-chemical monitoring. Other methods used are data mining, probabilistic mathematical modelling, decision trees and cost-benefit analyses for hazard identification, risk assessment and risk management.
|