Principal Investigator
Dr. Sam Harrison
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Lancaster Environment Centre
Collaborators
Prof. Bernd Nowack, Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology
Prof. Mark R Wiesner, Duke University
Description
The model will advance the current state of the art by:
- Providing EF on a European scale, considering regional differences in lifecycle processes (e.g. waste management) to predict spatially distributed emissions factors for Europe.
- Providing size distributed EF over relevant time horizons, based on predictions of fragmentation during the whole polymer lifecycle, building on work in ongoing Cefic-LRI project ECO59.
- Using an analysis of the complete life-cycle of polymers based on complete material-flow analysis of the polymers in the technosphere.
- Yielding probabilistic EF through the use of probabilistic material flow analysis (PMFA) pioneered by project partners.
The end product will be a framework for generating EF, applied to a broad range of polymer types. The EF generated will be ready for use in environmental exposure models and will be compatible with the unit-world exposure model being developed in Cefic-LRI project ECO56, and the long-range transport model in ECO57.
