While increased attention has been paid to strengthening of chemical management, the necessity to establish safety management of recycled products and resource management has been also increasing. Materials have both of valuable and hazardous aspects, and thus integrated material management that takes into account the both aspects is needed. We reviewed 151 acts in Japan relating to material management, and identified three major historical trends: the expansion of the number and category of materials, the expansion of the scope of subjects to be protected, and the expansion of the life stages.
A detailed review on 829 articles from 44 acts identified that there were six groups (seven subgroups) of treatment options for material management. Those are (1)exposure prevention, (2)closing of flows, (3)gate-checking, (4)informational management (notification and traceability), (5)resource supply/use, and (6)establishment of management systems. We found that applicability of gate-checking and notification to the post-consumer (downstream) stages were lower, exposure prevention and closing of flows were less applied to the use stage, which led to increased importance of informational management at the use stage, establishment of management systems were widely applied to all the life stages, etc.
Finally, we discussed features of the above mentioned (1), (2), and (6).

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Increased attention has been paid to strengthen chemical management, while establishment of safety management of recycled products and resource management are needed. Materials have both of valuable and hazardous aspects, which call for integrated material management. We reviewed treatment options in 829 articles from 44 acts and discussed features of gate-checking, informational management (notification and traceability), and resource supply/use.
Gate-checking can be characterized mainly by three types of items to check: material characteristics, treatment methods, and information. Applicability of gate-checking to the post-consumer stages was lower and material management at these life-stages needs to be complemented by other treatment options. Management by notification is suitable to cases where regulatory flexibility is favorable and should not be applied alone to management of materials with high risks. Traceability can be categorized by its purposes into ‘value-added’ type and ‘avoidance of loss’ type. Distinctive treatment options in resource management, which do not fall in the other treatment options, were granting rights for resources, resource discovery/security, limitation of resource extraction, promotion of recycling, stock of resources, and optimized material use. Application of treatment options which are frequently applied in hazardous chemical management is expanding into the field of resource management recently.

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Hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) is a brominated flame retardant used in insulation and textile coatings. In the near future, HBCD may be prohibited internationally because of concerns regarding its persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic nature. We estimated the exposure of Japanese people to HBCD and the temporal trend of the exposure in a three-stage exposure analysis.
First, we calculated the HBCD concentrations in air, soil, water, and sediments using a multi-media environmental fate model, based on HBCD emissions from 1985 to 2030 estimated from a substance flow analysis in Japan. Then, the concentrations in nine exposure sources were computed: ambient air, car air, building air, house dust, leaf vegetables, root vegetables, meat, milk, fish, and tap water. Finally, the exposure to HBCD via each source was determined based on the HBCD concentration in each source.
The highest HBCD exposure level was observed in 2011 at 4.8 ng/kg BW/day (intake via inhalation 0.33 ng/kg BW/day, via ingestion 4.5 ng/kg BW/day, dermal absorption 1.4×10^-8 ng/kg BW/day).

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