Assessment of the effects of toxic chemicals upon earthworms

Imperial Users onl

Towards a coherent industrial safety and environmental risk management philosophy in the United Kingdom.

Industrial risk management and pollution control strategies have been topics of active review in the UK during the past decade. Ultimate goals are the full accounting of the costs and benefits of remedial measures as a means of achieving more efficient and equitable decision processes, which are also transparent and reproducible. Considerable progress has been made in defining a coherent architecture for the management of human health risks, and analogous work is now underway in the environmental arena. Current and proposed approaches to the management of risk and the environment are based on constrained optimisation. That is, providing that risks or pollution loadings are within tolerable bounds, the aim is to achieve a reasonable balance between the costs of abatement measures and the benefits gained, with both expressed in monetary terms so far as this is possible. The same applies in the context of major accidents, though fundamental questions remain over the handling of societal risk

Risk management and consumer safety.

Risk assessment and risk management techniques are being developed in many fields as an aid to safety investment decision making. Already these techniques are having impacts upon aspects of consumer safety which overlap with other sectors where safety is important and where these methods are being applied. Recent examples where this has happened range from public transportation to the safety of children's playgrounds. This paper reports on progress in risk management in some of these sectors. Key elements include the notion of 'acceptabl' and 'tolerabl' risk, the optimisation of safety according to principles known as ALARP (as low as reasonably practicable) or ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable), and the use of quantitative methods such as cost-benefit analysis as an aid to decision making. Attention is drawn to a number of factors which consumer safety practitioners may wish to consider should it be decided to follow the trend towards a risk-based approach to the management of consumer safety