Insights

How USEtox Human Toxicity Assessment Borrows Epidemiological Language for Comparative Indices. In public health, DALY means "years of life lost"—a measure of real disease burden in populations. In LCA, "DALY" appears in USEtox scores as a comparative lifecycle index with 1-3 orders of magnitude uncertainty. Same acronym, fundamentally incompatible meanings. When toxicologists see "15.3 DALY," they interpret real health impacts. What the score actually represents: a persistence-intake-toxicity ranking metric that cannot answer "Is this safe?"

This short article concerns the interpretation of the USEtox unit used for the aquatic toxicity impact category used in LCA/PEF. A follow up article will address the use of DALY for the human impact assessment category.

If you've worked at the intersection of Life Cycle Assessment and chemical Risk Assessment, you've probably heard this debate: 👉 LCA practitioners think RA misses the bigger picture : cumulative effects of thousands of chemicals and long-term low-dose impacts that single-substance assessment cannot capture. 👉 Risk assessors argue USEtox scores have no proven link to actual human & ecosystem harm—and that only substance-by-substance RA can truly protect human health and the environment.

In every LCA you've run, metals probably dominates your ecotoxicity scores—even if your product doesn't contain a single gram of it. This isn't a bug, it's exactly how USEtox was designed.

The Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework, promoted by the European Commission in its Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, calls for an integrated assessment combining Safety and Sustainability from the design stage of substances and materials. This ambition requires toxicological and ecotoxicological data that can simultaneously serve two complementary objectives:

The recent integration of the near-field module into USEtox represents a major methodological advancement for assessing the sustainability of chemical substances. However, this innovation does not—and should not—replace consumer risk assessments conducted with regulatory tools like ConsExpo. Here's why both approaches are essential in a comprehensive SSbD strategy.

The purpose of this article is therefore to explain why USEtox Far-Field and 'EUSES'-based Risk Assessment cannot be interchanged, and why using USEtox for both safety and sustainability is not recommended.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is widely used to quantify the environmental footprint of products, processes and services. Yet a crucial part of the LCA machinery — impact assessment models — remains largely misunderstood. These models translate emissions and resource use into impact scores, and they are developed by different academic groups, using different assumptions, datasets and modelling philosophies.

In May 2025, during the SETAC Europe Annual Meeting in Vienna, I presented a perspective that is increasingly shaping the future of chemical management in Europe: the need to better connect Risk Assessment (RA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to support Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) innovation. Although these two disciplines evolved independently, their convergence is now essential for designing chemicals and materials aligned with the EU Green Deal and upcoming sustainability requirements.This article summarises the main messages of that presentation and highlights a decade of work conducted at the Joint Research Centre (JRC), Radboud University and now pursued through Net-Zero Impact.