B9-VITO: DRESS – DeRmal Exposure aSsessment Strategies

Description

The use of chemicals in consumer products has been, and still is, of great societal importance. Their use allowed industry to achieve a high level of innovation, as well as greatly improve the quality of day-to-day life of many consumers. The European chemical industry, as represented by CEFIC, and multiple sector organizations such as AISE and CEPE have for a long time been pro-active in identifying potential consumer health risks, and where needed assisting industry in reducing those risks due to exposure of chemicals present in or released by consumer product.

Obviously, dermal exposure assessment is one of the important pathways in a risk assessment of consumer products and articles. Dermal exposure assessment is required in various regulatory frameworks, like REACH and the biocidal products directive.

In order to better understand and quantify dermal exposure, a refined dermal exposure modeling strategy is needed. Hereto, this study sets out to achieve the following objectives:

• The identification of the key consumer products and articles for which demonstration of safe use is most challenging
• The identification of those dermal exposure determinants that benefit the most from data generation, including:

• Habits and practices of consumers, including its variability across population groups and geographical stratification across the EU
• Transfer factors (migration rates, thickness of contact films,  )
• External dermal exposure

• The identification of the main knowledge gaps in these exposure determinants and ways to fill them
• To perform experiments to fill these data gaps
• To integrate the information collected and data generate in a refined dermal exposure strategy, based on existing tools, and appended with tools for representing variability and uncertainty (e.g. suitable probabilistic modeling tools)