The goal of alternatives assessment is to identify safer alternatives for chemicals of concern. Comparative chemical hazard assessment is an important component of alternatives assessment. This project aimed to develop a webtool, the Alternatives Assessment (AA) Dashboard, which will display compiled chemical hazard data and enable users to readily compare alternatives on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Chemistry Dashboard (https://comptox.epa.gov/dashboard). We obtained chemical hazard data from public online sources including chemical hazard lists, Globally Harmonized System (GHS) scores from several different countries, and a database of quantitative toxicity values. We also obtained predicted values based on quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) models using EPA’s Toxicity Estimation Software Tool (TEST). We used Java programming to parse the data into a database and to generate hazard scores. For each data source, we determined a chemical hazard score (Low, Medium, High, or Very High) for each of several hazard endpoints (such as acute toxicity, carcinogenicity, etc.). Our scoring criteria were based on the EPA’s Design for the Environment Program (DfE) Alternatives Assessment Criteria for Hazard Evaluation. Other alternatives assessment methodologies such as GreenScreen have built on DfE. We compared advantages and disadvantages of a modified version of the trumping scheme used by GreenScreen and a weighted average method for combining scores from multiple sources into one chemical hazard score for each endpoint. The beta version of the AA dashboard currently contains over 290,000 score records for more than 85,000 chemicals. This webtool and its underlying data can aid in the pre-prioritization of chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) as amended by the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (LCSA).

Development of the alternatives assessment dashboard webtool

2019 Spring National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.