Using carcinogenic potency ranking to assign air contaminants to emission classes

Carcinogenic air contaminants are assigned to emission classes with different emission limits on the basis of their inhalation carcinogenic potency within the revised form of the German First General Administrative Regulation Pertaining to the Federal Emission Control Law (Technical Instructions on Air Quality Control-TA Luft). Accordingly, compounds with high carcinogenic potency are regulated more strictly than less potent substances. The data on carcinogenic properties are heterogeneous. Twenty-five substances or substance groups have been scrutinized and a procedure has been developed to rank these chemicals according to their carcinogenic potency. For 14 substances well-founded unit risk estimates were available to allow assignment of these air contaminants to emission classes. Unit risk estimates for bromoethane, 2-butanone oxime, and o-toluidine were derived using the ED(10)/LED(10) method based on animal studies. For several substances no qualified unit risk estimates or carcinogenicity studies were available to estimate carcinogenic potency after inhalation. Carcinogenic potency of these substances was approximated using two simple methods, T25 and CELmin.