A/HRC/36/41 Post-conflict communities 44. Existing laws intended to protect the environment during armed conflict have proven insufficient to prevent serious pollution and other forms of exposure to hazardous substances. Communities in and around conflict zones continue to face substantial legacies of toxic exposure. Furthermore, issues regarding weapons testing, contamination from military bases and other conflict-related sources of pollution and contamination are repeatedly raised by local communities suffering adverse impacts or lacking necessary information. In many cases, such communities are unable to secure an effective remedy. C. Adopt fundamental approaches 45. Three approaches, described below, have been identified by the international community as being crucial for States to follow in order to avoid adverse impacts related to hazardous substances in products and business activities, particularly on the most vulnerable. Inherently safer design 46. The best protection of the enjoyment of human rights against the impact of toxics is through prevention of exposure. For example, preventing exposure protects the rights to life, to health, to physical integrity, to dignity and to equality, and averts the difficulty of securing the right of victims to an effective remedy for harm that appears years or decades after exposure. 47. Good practices for the prevention of exposure are already well known. In the hierarchy of hazard controls, or “inherently safer design”, the best practice is the elimination of hazards. This is followed by risk mitigation options such as substitution with less hazardous substances and materials, engineering controls, administrative controls and the use of personal protective equipment, in order of most to least effective. 47 Elimination and substitution of hazardous substances is necessary to protect human rights throughout the life cycle of industrial products and processes, to reduce hazardous waste generation, and to enable the best transition to a healthy circular economy. Paying greater attention to elimination and substitution would contribute significantly to alleviating the disproportionate impacts on vulnerable groups. Life-cycle approach 48. States should take a life-cycle approach to the extraction, production, use, release and disposal of toxics. This may facilitate links between the economic, social and environmental dimensions of business operations throughout the value chain. Such an approach is essential to reducing the toxic footprint of consumption and production and protecting vulnerable groups throughout the life cycles of products, and a key element in ensuring sustainable development. 49. A life-cycle approach takes into account the adverse impacts of a product over its entire life cycle, going beyond a narrow focus on an enterprise’s production facilities and processes. A product’s life cycle begins with the extraction of raw materials, and includes the energy requirements of that extraction. Materials and energy are then an intrinsic part of production, packaging, distribution, use and maintenance, and eventually recycling, reuse, recovery or final disposal. At each life-cycle stage there is the potential to prevent toxic exposure by ensuring better design and by reducing raw material inputs, hazardous substances in the product, and the toxicity and volume of waste requiring disposal. Global approach 50. States cannot reasonably expect to respect, protect and fulfil human rights implicated by toxics without a global approach. The issues presented by hazardous 47 See www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/hierarchy/. 11