Monetary valuation is used in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to aggregate environmental impacts expressed with different units of measure and therefore not directly comparable, in order to facilitate the communication and the use of LCA results in decision-making processes.

Purpose. The EU Environmental Footprint (EF) is a life cycle assessment – based method which aims at assessing the environmental impacts of products and organizations through 16 midpoint impact categories, among which three address toxicity-related impacts. This paper presents the principles underpinning the calculation of the set of Characterisation Factors (CFs) for the toxicity-related impact categories in the EF version 3.0: freshwater ecotoxicity (ECOTOX), human toxicity – cancer (HTOX_c) and human toxicity – non-cancer (HTOX_nc). Methods. In order to respond to the issues emerged during the EF pilot phase, the input data and the calculation principles of the USEtox® model were updated. In particular: (i) Robustness Factors (RFs) were introduced to reduce the dominance of metals and to balance the inappropriate modelling of non-organic compounds in USEtox®; (ii) high quality data were selected from databases of EU agencies (European Chemicals Agency and European Food Safety Authority) to guarantee the reliability of input data; and (iii) a new approach based on HC20 (Hazard Concentration killing 20% of the exposed population) was implemented to derive freshwater ecotoxicity Effect Factors (EfF). Results and discussion.

The EU Commission published in 2013 a recommendation on the use of a common method to measure and communicate the life cycle environmental performance of products and organizations. In November 2013, started a four years pilot exercise with industries, NGOs, and academia to assess the effectiveness of the method on 25 product categories.

In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), according to ISO 14044 (ISO 2006), normalisation and weighting are optional steps of Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA). Those steps allow expressing LCA results aggregating the results (up to a single score), giving different weight to the different environmental impacts.