Health Impacts of Chemicals in Consumer Products

This course is a part of Healthy and Sustainable Foods and Products, a 4-course Specialization series from Coursera.

This course focuses on assessing health impacts of chemicals in products and of fine particulate emitted along the product life cycle. We first develop the assessment framework to assess exposure and health impacts of chemicals in products. We then detail the application of mass-balance approaches to the case of parabens in personal care products. Participants then learn to assess the human health impacts of chemicals in products using the USEtox model (UN-Environment toxicity model) and discuss the level of protection offered by existing regulations about chemicals in products contrasting US and Europe. We extend the assessment to risks and impacts 5000+ chemical-household product combinations identifying the products and chemicals of concern in e.g. home maintenance and personal care products and looking at children as a sensitive population and at the magnitude of the risks associated with exposures to chemicals in toys. We also introduce a Life Cycle-based approach to Chemical Alternatives Assessment (CAA) combining both quantified exposure and hazards and discuss the applicability domain of CAA compared to Risk Assessment (RA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). We finally determine exposure to and effect of fine particulates on human health along the product and chemical supply chain and life cycle. This course concludes the course series by providing cutting-edge progress on the overall exposome and compares the health impacts of multiple environmental exposures on health.