By the recent EU-activities, like the White Paper or like REACH, the interest in priority setting of chemicals is renewed. Risk assessment is to be performed on the basis of the model EUSES, developed in commission of the EU. However, the set of Exposure models and the PEC/PNEC-concept need a full developed database, by which each chemical can be characterized according to the needs of EUSES. The data availability hampers the application of EUSES severely, albeit Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships Models are widely accepted. Therefore a prescreening is needed to find out the most important chemicals. Processes like transport, reactions and (adverse) effects of chemicals in the environment require a set of characteristic properties in order to estimate the extent of these processes. Hence a multi-criteria approach is the appropriate tool to rank chemicals according to their potential impacts on the environment. As in further steps a careful analysis of the selected chemicals is done, it does not seem justified to include subjective preferences by stakeholders into the multi-criteria approach. It is shown by a simple transport model EXWAT that the descriptors derived from the model can be used to get a generalized ranking scheme by partial order.