Using E-PRTR data on point source emissions to air and water—First steps towards a national chemical footprint

A new paper by a team including PRINCE Consortium members Viveka Palm and Göran Finnveden proposes a way of using data on point-source emissions to start constructing national hazardous chemical footprint indicators.

While the dangers of chemical pollution have long been known, or at least suspected, there is a great lack of indicators to monitor their use and potential impacts. This paper aims to develop and test an approach to calculate the potential environmental impacts of chemicals for a whole country, using the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) as a data source and Sweden as an example.