National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
Dr. Ann Blake participated in workshop, with focus on Decision-Making and Weighing subgroup
Background
The HESI Frameworks for Alternative Chemical Assessment and Selection of Safer, Sustainable Alternatives Subcommittee (a.k.a. Sustainable Alternatives Subcommittee) was initiated in 2011 as an Emerging Issues Subcommittee. Its mission is to evaluate and identify key elements/criteria and tools to help trigger and guide the selection of safer, sustainable alternatives while minimizing the likelihood of regrettable substitutions. The subcommittee is comprised of technical experts from academia, industry, non-profit organizations, and government and has been working towards holding a workshop to develop more detailed guidance for conducting alternatives assessments. Results of the workshop and of the subcommittee will be submitted for publication in a peer reviewed journal.
Workshop Purpose
The purpose of the workshop was to bring together multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary expertise to develop practical, problem driven guidance on the conduct of alternatives assessment. To accomplish this, the subcommittee was divided into three subgroups to address three interrelated topics where clear challenges were previously identified. The goal of each subgroup was to lead a multi-stakeholder discussion, that developed useful techniques and guidance documents to enhance existing alternatives assessment frameworks and to identify challenges where further work is needed. The three subgroup topics were:
1) Attributes and Tools
- Attributes beyond hazard that are also important, including life cycle assessment, exposure, risk,
performance, cost and social responsibility - New tools for prioritization and assessment of hazard, risk and other attributes
2) Decision-making and Weighing
- Making decisions with limited data and a minimum data set
- Best practices for weighing disparate attributes
3) Data gaps
- What are the data gaps and data needs
- What are solutions for missing data