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Chemicals of concern (CoCs) contained in everyday products can have harmful impacts on human health and the environment. While chemical-related impacts can often occur during a product’s use or end-of-life, decisions influencing product ingredients are taken further upstream of the value chain. Action to address CoCs in products thus need to consider the entire value chain and impactful interventions need to be made at upstream stages to protect human health and the environment from chemical pollution. UNEP is working on

Technological development has made electrical and electronic equipment (EEE1) essential parts of contemporary life and indispensable products in today’s societies. Information technology (IT) combined with the technological advances in recent decades, has resulted in EEE having a great influence on the daily life of consumers in aspects such as health, safety, knowledge, comfort information, among others. The global consumption of electronics is growing 2.5 million metric tons per year (Forti, Baldé, Kuehr, & Bel, 2020), because technology increases the living

With a total revenue of more than 90 billion USD in 2018, the global toy market is an important sector of consumer products. Like many other products, toys are composed of a diverse range of materials. Many of these materials are made of, or contain manufactured chemicals. Most of these chemicals are intentionally added, but some can also be present as unintended contaminants.Many chemicals have properties that can make them hazardous to human health and/or the environment. The potential use

We present a list of Chemicals of Concern (CoCs) in plastic toys. We started from available studies reporting chemical composition of toys to group plastic materials, as well as to gather mass fractions and function of chemicals in these materials. Chemical emissions from plastic toys and subsequent human exposures were then estimated using a series of models and a coupled near-field and far-field exposure assessment framework. Comparing human doses with reference doses shows high Hazard Quotients of up to 387

AbstractThe world faces an increasing need to phase out harmful chemicals and design sustainable alternatives across various consumer products and industrial applications. Alternatives assessment is an emerging field focusing on identifying viable solutions to substitute harmful chemicals. However, current methods fail to consider trade-offs from human and ecosystem exposures, and from impacts associated with chemical supply chains and product life cycles. To close this gap, we propose a life cycle based alternatives assessment (LCAA) framework for consistently integrating quantitative exposure

This course will help the participants to understand why and how to manage e-waste in an environmentally sound manner and how action on e-waste could be taken in their own life, business, or organization.The aims of the course are to:Show how sound management of e-waste can help reduce GHG emissions, mitigate climate change and prevent hazards to health and the environment in accordance with the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm conventions;Share best practices, technological innovations, and sustainable e-waste recovery and inclusive