Review Articles

Hazard assessment is based both on estimates of environmental exposure and ecotoxic, toxic, and other noxious effects. Environmental criteria are given to enable a preliminary categorization of the hazard post by a chemical.
Depending on the amount and quality of data, the hazard estimates may be very rough (so that large safety margins are required), or more or less satisfactory. Risk assessment (not considered in detail) requires sufficient quantitative information, not available for most chemicals. Scoring systems give first approximations if many chemicals are to be assessed with a minimum amount of data.
More elaborate hazard assessment systems are shortly discussed. A main problem of all assessment procedures are the extremely toxic chemicals with no or very small production and the persistent chemical without known adverse effects. Suggestions are made how to deal with these difficult cases.