ENVR E-150: Life Cycle and Risk Assessment

As a vehicle for practical and lasting learning, we will tackle two major assignments during the course. First, participants will apply the basic principles and techniques of toxicology and risk assessment to perform a case study evaluation of an actual proposed pesticide. We will compare our findings with those from the actual EPA risk assessment and evaluation. Next, students will work in 2- or 3-person teams for the remainder of the course, applying professional life cycle assessment software and databases to perform a life cycle assessment project of real-world relevance to them in their work or careers.

Written 1-2-paragraph summaries of the weekly lecture discussions will be due 7 days from the date that the lecture becomes available for viewing on the web.
Summaries should have as their header the name of the student, and the dates of the lectures to which the summaries pertain.

Participants will be able to publish their term project results in a variety of forms, using the wiki-style course website. The project could be communicated as a basic written report; we will also facilitate student attempts to alternatively use the course web site authoring capability to construct their own website documenting the project results.

The course grade will be based on the following:

20% - Lecture summaries

30% - Risk assessment case study

50% - Term project life cycle assessment

For local participants, term project will break out as 30% for written/web report, 20% in-class presentation.
For distance participants, it will be full 50% for written/web report.

Term projects will be due on the last day of class.
There will be no final exam.