In the environmental field there are available databases for the various sources of pollution. How much do you trust a specific value that is given to you. In case you did not see how to proceed?
Every sort of data have intrinsic uncertainty attached to them,even if you collected them by yourself... trusting information that was not collected by you depends on whether you have as well available all the data on the applied methodology (for collection) and the particular incidences that may have occurred on the field during the data collection campaign... further you should have an assessment on the quality of the original data and on whether any post-processing was applied, etc. (including laboratory analyses). If all of that is available, then you can trust it and even you will have a measure of data uncertainty... otherwise, you can not trust that much to your database and, unfortunately, you will end up assuming that the data are correct but knowing that there is a significant data uncertainty which might be a significant burden when using these data in numerical modelling ....
You should never trust unknown sources, but use them with the knowledge of uncertainty. Depending on you application, purpose, and goal with the study you need to take different care in quality assurance and data collection.
Are you preforming a brief assessment of some products you can use what ever data you find. But still note the data uncertainty.
Are you submitting data to LCI databases or doing a detailed assessment, it is really important with full control of the main data sources.
Note that you should also take make an sensitivity analysis and try to secure data quality of important data sets.
Most of the software provides details of data in the database like how the sampling, measurement and calculation have been done. So if the data in the database is from unseen site. First step should be to go through the details of measurement. Also see the uncertainty of the data.
In some software like Erica Tool for Risk assessment they have data, let us take example of Kd values. In such cases even you are sure that I can trust at this data that all the sampling, measurement and calculations are correct; do not take such value for your calculation as you will find a variation in data for same parameter in the different environment.
In some of the software there is provision for data input so use that function and feed your own data from your own environment for better result.
In my point of view, it is depends on the subject, complexity of subject, purpose of use and position of user will classify answers.
You can do a quick hand calculation to check your final figures. By hand I mean you might need an Excel spreadsheet to do the calcs. The overall values can always be checked against published data for similar material. This is not an exact science, so a ball park figure will do.
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