title: Occupational Health Impacts Due to Exposure to Organic Chemicals over an Entire Product Life Cycle.
abstract: This article presents an innovative approach to include occupational exposures to organic chemicals in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) by building on the characterization factors set out in Kijko et al. (2015) to calculate the potential impact of occupational exposure over the entire supply chain of product or service. Based on an economic input-output model and labor and economic data, the total impacts per dollar of production are provided for 430 commodity categories and range from 0.025 to 6.6 disability-adjusted life years (DALY) per million dollar of final economic demand. The approach is applied on a case study assessing human health impacts over the life cycle of a piece of office furniture. It illustrates how to combine monitoring data collected at the manufacturing facility and averaged sector specific data to model the entire supply chain. This paper makes the inclusion of occupational exposure to chemicals fully compatible with the LCA framework by including the supply chain of a given production process and will help industries focus on the leading causes of human health impacts and prevent impact shifting.
authors: CIRAIG, Polytechnique Montréal, Chemical Engineering Department, 3333 Chemin Queen-Mary, Suite 310, P.O. Box 6079, Station Centre-ville, Montréal, Quebec Canada, H3C 3A7.
authors: Gaël
authors: G
authors: Kijko
authors: Department of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Michigan , Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, United States.
authors: Olivier
authors: O
authors: Jolliet
authors: CIRAIG, Polytechnique Montréal, Chemical Engineering Department, 3333 Chemin Queen-Mary, Suite 310, P.O. Box 6079, Station Centre-ville, Montréal, Quebec Canada, H3C 3A7.
authors: Manuele
authors: M
authors: Margni
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007221:Industry; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D016273:Occupational Exposure; D016272:Occupational Health; D009930:Organic Chemicals
chemical_list: D009930:Organic Chemicals