International approaches to reducing the risk of highly hazardous chemicals exposure on human health and to the selection criteria for substitution by safer analogues (literature review)

Introduction. Replacing hazardous substances with less hazardous ones is a basic principle of any good chemical risk management. At the first stage of scientific research on the development of a national concept for the replacement of highly hazardous chemicals in the composition of products (food, synthetic detergents and household chemicals, pesticides, paints and varnishes, basic chemicals) with safer analogues, 
the purpose of the research was:

• to study international and domestic approaches to the organization of monitoring and regulation of substances highly hazardous to human health and the environment;
• analysis, selection and scientific substantiation of criteria for selecting chemicals for their replacement with safer analogues.

Materials and methods. materials, used for the analysis were the literature sources from the bibliographic databases Web of Science, MedLine, EMBASE, Global Health, PubMed, Scopus, RSCI. The guidelines and recommendations of the OECD, WHO, ILO, FAO, UNEP on the organization and implementation of monitoring of highly hazardous chemicals in environmental objects have been studied and analyzed. 

A number of international agreements are considered, which are based on criteria for prohibiting or restricting the use of substances on the market that cause an unacceptable risk.

Results. An analysis of international approaches to the sound management of chemicals has shown that the identification of causal relationships between health and/or environmental conditions and exposure to a chemical factor is a trigger for the concept of substitution. In this regard, the tools and databases of socio-hygienic monitoring carried out by Rospotrebnadzor can serve as the basis for identifying highly hazardous substances that require management decisions to be made to ban, restrict circulation and replace them with safe analogues.

The study of foreign and domestic materials on the selection of priority criteria for identifying substances of greatest concern for the purpose of risk assessment and further regulation showed that the following indicators are the main ones:

• biological activity (carcinogens, mutagens, GHS class 1A and 1B reprotoxicants, endocrine disruptors),
• stability in the environment,
• bioaccumulative potential (bioconcentration factor BCF >2000, partition coefficient n-octanol/water Log Kow ≥ 4),
• the possibility of cross-media transfer (air, water flows),
• toxicity to representatives of aquatic biota (acute and chronic toxicity of hazard class 1 in accordance with GHS),
• production volumes (volumes of emissions and discharges),
• number of contacts.