Clean Cycle sub-project 1: Plastics Additives and Human Exposure

In the short video here above, PhD student Helene Wiesinger gives a brief overview on the project (if the video is not available in your region, please use external page this link).

The goal of this focus area is to determine the risk to human health due to potentially hazardous substances present during plastic recycling processes and in recycled plastic products.
To understand which substances in plastic can pose a risk to human health, a comprehensive database of chemicals intentionally added to plastic and plastic-products will be established. Physico-chemical and toxicologically relevant properties of these substances will be determined using databases, current scientific literature and computational tools (QSARs). Potentially hazardous additives will be selected based on substance properties and use-patterns that can influence human exposure and health hazard. The selection criteria will include production volume, release potential, persistence, bioaccumulation, toxicity and other human hazard end-points.
In order to verify the presence of potentially hazardous substances in plastic products in Switzerland, a measurement campaign will be conducted. Selected plastic fractions will be chemically analyzed and pollutant concentrations that have already been measured in plastic products (e.g. from the cantonal laboratories in Switzerland) will be consulted. Subsequently, using the combination of these results with the mass flow analysis results from Focus area 2, current and potential future exposure of humans to potentially hazardous substances and associated risks will be modeled. For this purpose, scenario-based chemical exposure models will be applied and different exposure routes for the various plastic types and products will be considered.