The Nordic Expert Group for Criteria Documentation of Health Risks from Chemicals 124. Thermal Degradation Products of Polyethylene, Polypropylene, Polystyrene, Polyvinylchloride and Polytetrafluoroethylene in the Processing of Plastics

The National Institute for Working Life is Sweden's center for research and development on labour market, working life and work environment. Diffusion of information , training and teaching, local development and international collaboration are other important issues for the Institute. The R&D competence will be found in the following areas: Labour market and labour legislation, work organization and production technology, psychosocial working conditions, occupational medicine, allergy, effects on the nervous system, ergonomics, work environment technology and musculoskeletal disorders, chemical hazards and toxicology. A total of about 470 people work at the Institute, around 370 with research and development. The Institute's staff includes 32 professors and in total 122 persons with a postdoctoral degree. The National Institute for Working Life has a large international collaboration in R&D, including a number of projects within the EC Framework Programme for Research and Technology Development. Preface The Nordic Council is an intergovernmental collaborative body for the five countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. One of the committees, the Nordic Senior Executive Committee for Occupational Environmental Matters, initiated a project in order to produce criteria documents to be used by the regulatory authorities in the Nordic countries as a scientific basis for the setting of national occupational exposure limits. The management of the project is given to an expert group. At present the Nordic Expert Group consists of the following member: For each document an author is appointed by the Expert Group and the national member acts as a referent. The author searches for literature in different data bases such as Toxline, Medline, Cancerlit and Nioshtic. Information from other sources such as WHO, NIOSH and the Dutch Expert Committee is also used as are handbooks such as Patty's Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology. Evaluation is made of all relevant scientific original literature found. In exceptional cases information from documents difficult to access are used. The draft document is discussed within the Expert Group and is finally accepted as the Group's document. Only literature judged as reliable and relevant for the discussion is referred to in this document. Concentrations in air are given in mg/m 3 and in biological media in mol/l. In case they are otherwise given in the original papers they are if possible recalculated and the original values are given within brackets. The documents aim at establishing a dose-response/dose-effect relationship and defining a critical effect based only on the scientific literature. The task …