Improving commercial chemical stewardship in Canada

加拿大(根据CEPA)、美国(根据TSCA)、欧盟(根据REACH计划)和其他几个国家有法律义务评估数千种当前使用的和新的商业化学品的环境行为，目的是确定对环境和人类健康有害的物质。目前用于评估化学品在食物网中生物放大能力的框架有一个重大局限性，即它不能解释生物分解。这可能导致对许多商业化学品的环境危害进行错误分类，导致不必要的经济困难，丧失化学产品的社会效益，并增加对人类健康和环境影响的风险。对商业化学品的环境影响进行适当的全球分类对加拿大具有特别重要的战略意义，因为加拿大的人类和野生动物种群特别容易受到全球使用的化学物质的影响(由于其寒冷的北方地区充当化学污染物的冷陷阱)，而加拿大几乎无法控制作为污染物来源的全球市场。加拿大在保护水、空气的环境质量以及人类和野生动物的健康方面最有效的战略是在制定有效的环境法规的科学中发挥领导作用，并在国际上努力推动和促进这些法规的应用。为了解决目前环境评估计划无法纳入生物分解的问题，我们建议在化学制造业、加拿大环境测试公司和加拿大环境与健康局的支持下进行一项研究，开发和调查体外分析技术，以表征非常疏水(因此具有潜在生物累积)的有机物质的生物转化率，并将测试结果纳入加拿大和世界其他国家目前用于评估商业化学品的生物累积性质的生物累积模型中。

Canada (under CEPA), the United States (under TSCA), the European Union (under the REACh program) and several other countries are under the legal obligation to evaluate the environmental behaviour of the many thousands of current-use and new commercial chemicals with the goal to identify harmful substances for the environment and human health. The current framework used to assess the ability of chemicals to biomagnify in food-webs has a major limitation in that it cannot account for the biological breakdown. This can cause the miscategorization of the environmental hazards of many commercial chemicals leading to unnecessary economic hardship, loss of societal benefits of chemical products as well as increased risk of human health and environmental effects. The proper global categorization of the environmental effects of commercial chemicals is of particular strategic importance to Canada because human and wildlife populations in Canada areparticularly vulnerable to globally used chemical substances (due to its cold northerly locations which acts as cold trap for chemical pollutants) while it has little control of the global markets which are the source of the pollutants. Canada's most effective strategy in safeguarding environmental quality of water, air and the health of its human and wildlife populations is to pursue a leading role in the science of developing effective environmental regulations and to work internationally to advance and promote the application of these regulations. To address the inability of current environmental assessment schemes to incorporate biological breakdown, we propose to conduct a study with support from the chemical manufacturing industry, Canadian environmental testing companies and Environment and Health Canada to develop and investigate in-vitro assaytechniques to characterize the biological transformation rate of very hydrophobic (hence potentially bioaccumulative) organic substances and include the results from such tests in bioaccumulation models that are currently used by Canada and other countries in the world to assess the bioaccumulative nature of commercial chemicals.