An assessment of the sanitary impacts of the waste treatment industry. State of the art and practices on an international level

Summary

Waste treatment produces atmospheric emissions, solid residues and liquid effluents that may be toxic to humans, and more particularly to people living in the vicinity of and working at waste treatment facilities. For a number of years now, France has been applying a health risk assessment (HRA) procedure for waste treatment, which mainly concerns atmospheric emissions from incineration. It has been extended to landfill disposal, and other waste treatment methods are still being developed. To do this, it uses an approach that was developed in the United States in the 1980s by the Academy of Sciences. The study consists of identifying and describing the main assessment approaches that exist internationally, reporting on the importance given to them by national legislation and assessing the effectiveness of their practical application at the level of the facilities and their environment, in order to highlight any deviations from the legislation.
The action programme is organised in 3 stages:
1. a phase of gathering information on the various countries of interest,
2. a phase of analysis and synthesis of the documents identified,
3. a phase of description of the means implemented for the application of the HRA approach in the field.

This report consists of 3 parts:
1. a general approach to HRA at international level, distinguishing between countries that use it and those that do not,
2. an in-depth study of countries that use HRA (or similar approaches),
3. a presentation of other approaches to estimating health risks associated with industrial impacts.