Mark Crane, PhD is an environmental toxicologist with over 20 years of experience in environmental consultancy and academia, and is Marketing Director of wca environment. Mark has published over 130 peer reviewed articles and chapters and has co-edited five books on environmental hazard and risk assessment.
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New website on Alternatives to Animal Testing
We have worked with our collaborators to produce a new website which presents the results from a four-year Defra project on Alternatives to Animal Testing. The following tasks were completed: Toxicological information for skin sensitisation and fish acute toxicity were collated. This information was obtained from the open literature (including a variety of internet sources) [...]
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Workshop on Alternatives to Animal Testing – September the 17th
Results of a Defra-funded project on Alternatives to Animal Testing will be presented at a free to attend one-day meeting in Leeds on 17th September.
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Water Sustainability and the Food Industry
wca environment’s Chairman, John Fawell, has recently worked on several water sustainability projects for food companies. Water footprint is becoming much more important for many companies – and this is particularly the case for various parts of the food industry, which has been scrutinised and subsequently criticised by many green groups.
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Paper on Multicriteria Decision Analysis for Endocrine Active Substances
This paper has now been published. Members of SETAC can download it free, and an abstract is available to everyone.
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Socioeconomic assessment under REACH (again!)
A few weeks ago I mentioned an ECHA workshop that I attended in Helsinki at which I gave a presentation on translating risk assessment outputs into socioeconomic analysis inputs. Presentations and other useful information from this meeting have now been uploaded by ECHA onto their website and can be found here. I clearly made a [...]
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Application of Uncertainty Analysis to Ecological Risks of Pesticides
A chapter I co-authored on statistical issues underlying the selection of distributions in probabilistic risk assessment has now been published by SETAC
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Converting Environmental Risk Assessment Outputs into Socioeconomic Impact Assessment Inputs under REACH
I’ve recently completed work for European Competent Authorities to develop instructive examples when translating environmental risks into environmental impacts for informing socioeconomic analysis and eventual decision making under REACH.
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Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for Detecting the Effects of Endocrine Active Substances in Fish Life Cycle Tests
Mel and I have another paper with co-authors in a forthcoming issue of the SETAC journal Integrated Environmental Assessment & Management. This one is on the use of Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) for choosing between different test designs when performing fish full life cycle (FFLC) tests with potential endocrine active substances.
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Thresholds of Toxicological Concern for Endocrine Active Substances in the Aquatic Environment
A forthcoming paper by Mel, me and several other colleagues in January’s issue of the SETAC journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management looks at use of the threshold of toxicological concern. The threshold of toxicological concern (TTC) concept proposes that an exposure threshold value can be derived for chemicals, below which no significant risk to human health or the environment is expected. This concept goes further than setting acceptable exposure levels for individual chemicals, because it attempts to set a de minimis value for chemicals, including those of unknown toxicity, by taking the chemical’s structure or mode of action (MOA) into consideration.
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Derivation and Use of Environmental Quality and Human Health Standards for Chemical Substances in Water and Soil
A book on Environmental Quality Standards, edited by Graham, Dawn and me has just been published by CRC Press. Chemical standards are widely used to protect the environment and human health from substances released by human activity. Generally speaking, standards relate to doses or concentrations in the environment for specific chemicals, below which unacceptable effects are not expected to occur.
