A theoretical concept to rank environmentally significant chemicals

We assess the environmental hazards of 13 pesticides by means of Hasse diagrams. These diagrams are graph theoretical visualizations of partially ordered sets. A multicriteria assessment is performed, and some methodological aspects are shown. Besides the ranking results there are shown stability, sensitivity, and robustness studies. An EDV-code is available from the first author, which draws the graphs and calculates several characteristic quantities. As evaluative properties the persistence, the aqueous solubility, the vapor pressure, and the yearly usage are taken. It is shown that (i) six pesticides out of 13 are of higher risk, (ii) the selected properties are rather complete to perform a ranking, and (iii) the most important property to rank the chemicals is the aqueous solubility.