| Abstract
| - Integrated product policy (IPP) and life cycle assessment(LCA), one of the analytic tools used in IPP, focustraditionally on environmental impacts. However, in anattempt to consider other sustainability criteria and to avoida shift from environmental health impacts to occupationalhealth impacts one may want to include occupationalhealth in IPP. Should and can occupational health impactsbe included in LCA and IPP? Using published andunpublished occupational health data for injuries andillnesses and an economic input−output model of the UnitedStates, we provide attributional occupational healthimpacts measured in disability adjusted life years perdollars output for 491 industry sectors including supplychain impacts. Estimates for the “true” number of UnitedStates occupational health impacts suggest that this initialanalysis underestimates the total impact 3−7-fold. Acomparison suggests that United States occupational healthimpacts are about 10 times smaller than environmentalhealth impacts and are, relatively speaking, important onlyfor sectors with hazardous working environments butlow environmental impacts. A consequential rather thanattributional view suggests that a method to assess trueconsequences on long-term health impacts by product policiesneeds to be able to predict effects from present-daywork place exposure and to account for likely changes inthe labor market, including changes in unemploymentrates and other substitution mechanisms.
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