Soil Generic Assessment Criteria for Human Health Risk ... - ESdat

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Introduction
This report presents the results of a collaborative effort of risk assessors from 26 EIC and AGS member companies
to produce generic assessment criteria (GAC) for soils for human health risk assessment. The project involved the
collation and review of physico-chemical data, toxicological data and information on background exposure for 44
contaminants sometimes encountered on land affected by contamination in the UK and the derivation of GAC
for 35 1 of these using the CLEA model (v1.06). The GAC are intended to complement soil guideline values (SGV)
produced by the Environment Agency of England and Wales and the 2nd edition GAC produced by LQM and CIEH
(Nathanail et al, 2009). All three sets of assessment criteria have been derived in general accordance with the
Environment Agency of England and Wales Contaminated Land Exposure Assessment (CLEA) guidance and thus the
combined efforts of these three groups have resulted in a useful set of screening criteria for the assessment of risks
to human health from soil contamination for more than 120 potentially contaminative substances.
Introduction
1.1
Background
As discussed in the CLR11 Model Procedures report (Environment Agency, 2004) GAC are a useful screening tool
in the assessment of risks from land contamination. When used in conjunction with the conceptual site model
they can streamline the risk assessment process by reducing the number of contaminants and/or pollutant linkages
requiring more detailed risk assessment and in many cases can help to demonstrate that there are no unacceptable
risks at a site.
The EIC initiative to derive GAC was initiated in December 2008 after the introduction of the revised CLEA
methodology in August of that year. At that time, the Environment Agency of England and Wales had plans to
produce SGV for around 15 substances/groups of substances in the forthcoming months. These SGV would provide
authoritative screening criteria for the assessment of risks to human health but still represented a relatively small
number of the commonly encountered contaminants in UK soils. Two projects were initiated to help fill this gap:
the EIC project, presented herein and the LQM/CIEH project. LQM and CIEH, aided by a wide collaboration from the
contaminated land community, worked on the derivation of GAC for 82 contaminants through the first half of 2009
and published these in July 2009. The EIC project, also collaborative in nature and supported by AGS and CL:AIRE,
was initiated to produce industry agreed GAC to complement those of LQM/CIEH and published SGV.
1 Note that there were insufficient toxicological data available to derive health criteria values (HCV) that were acceptable to the entire group of
risk assessors for nine substances and consequently GAC were not derived for these substances
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