Occupational Health Impacts Due to Exposure to Organic Chemicals over an Entire Product Life Cycle

This
article presents an innovative approach to include occupational
exposures to organic chemicals in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)
by building on the characterization factors set out in Kijko et al.
(2015) to calculate the potential impact of occupational exposure
over the entire supply chain of product or service. Based on an economic
input-output model and labor and economic data, the total impacts
per dollar of production are provided for 430 commodity categories
and range from 0.025 to 6.6 disability-adjusted life years (DALY)
per million dollar of final economic demand. The approach is applied
on a case study assessing human health impacts over the life cycle
of a piece of office furniture. It illustrates how to combine monitoring
data collected at the manufacturing facility and averaged sector specific
data to model the entire supply chain. This paper makes the inclusion
of occupational exposure to chemicals fully compatible with the LCA
framework by including the supply chain of a given production process
and will help industries focus on the leading causes of human health
impacts and prevent impact shifting.