Development of ecotoxicological terrestrial effet data in the context of life cycle impact assessment

在生命周期评估（LCA）中，生命周期影响评估（LCIA）将产品生命周期（从原材料提取到生命周期结束）的排放清单转化为产品的环境概况，代表其对广泛环境影响的潜在贡献。LCIA依靠物质特异性表征因子（CFs）来表示物质对健康和环境影响的相对贡献。在生命周期评估中，与污染物排放对土壤的影响有关的特征仍然很差，一些挑战仍然必须解决。其中一个挑战是，由于缺乏陆地生态毒理学效应数据，使用从默认土壤-水分布系数（Kd）推断的水生生态毒理学数据（EC50）进行有偏差的陆地效应建模。一些污染物的外推方法被认为是不确定的，因此没有计算它们的CFs。这是一个令人关注的问题，因为缺乏表征因素可能被解释为在LCA驱动的决策过程中缺乏陆地生态毒理学影响。因此，有必要产生新的陆地效应数据，以便提供更有意义的生态毒性结果。该项目将通过评估新的陆地效应数据，改善生态毒理学影响的特征。这些新数据将通过调整和改进我们实验室开发的一种具有成本效益的五氯酚（PCP）方法来产生，该方法已被证明可以利用pcr -变性梯度凝胶电泳（DGGE）技术产生陆地生物多样性指标，这些指标高度代表所研究的土壤细菌群落，并计算生态物种多样性指数。计算CFs所需的EC50从这些多样性指数中获得。由于土壤微生物群落是原生生物，不是在实验室中生长的，而是由数千种相互作用的物种组成，这些物种在生态位和代谢潜力方面存在差异，因此这种方法有可能帮助填补陆地生态毒理学数据库中的许多空白。该项目的主要目标是完善新的土壤微生物多样性指标框架，生成新的土壤门效应数据（EC50），以便更好地评估LCIA陆地生态毒理学影响类别的可靠性。具体目标是：1)调整框架，为除PCP以外的有机产品开发新的EC50；2)测试框架是否可以推导出HC50EC50等生态毒性质量标准（EQC）； 3)测试框架是否可以推导出无机（Zn）的新的陆地效应数据。CFs将根据新的效果数据计算，新的CFs将通过案例研究在IMPACT World+中进行整合和操作。从长远来看，这项研究将通过为目前没有的物质提供新的CFs，从而有可能更好地评估陆地生态毒理学影响的特征。

Within life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) translates the inventory of emissions from a product’s life cycle (from raw materials extraction until end of life) into an environmental profile of the product, representing its potential contributions to a wide range of environmental impacts. LCIA relies on substance-specific characterization factors (CFs) to represent the relative contribution of the substance to health and environmental impacts. In life cycle assessment, the impacts related to pollutant emissions to soil remain poorly characterized, and several challenges must still be addressed. One such challenge is biased terrestrial effect modeling using aquatic ecotoxicological data (EC50) extrapolated from default soil-water distribution coefficients (Kd) due to the lack of terrestrial ecotoxicological effect data. The extrapolation approach for some pollutants is considered so uncertain that no CFs were calculated for them. This is preoccupying since the lack of characterization factors may be interpreted as an absence of terrestrial ecotoxicological impacts in a decision-making process driven by LCA. As such, there is a need to produce new terrestrial effect data in order to provide more meaningful ecotoxicity results. This project will improve the characterization of ecotoxicological impacts by assessing new terrestrial effect data. These new data will be produced by adapting and improving a cost-effective methodology developed in our laboratory for pentachlorophenol (PCP) that has been proven to yield terrestrial biodiversity indicators that are highly representative of the studied soil bacterial communities using PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) technology and calculating ecological species diversity indices. The EC50 needed to calculate the CFs are obtained from these diversity indices. As soil microbial communities are indigenous organisms that are not grown in the laboratory and composed of thousands of interacting species that differ in terms of their ecological niche and metabolic potential, this methodology has the potential to help fill the many gaps in the terrestrial ecotoxicological databases. The main goal of the project is to improve the new framework to derive soil microbial biodiversity indicators and to produce new soil phyla effect data (EC50) in order to better assess the reliability of the terrestrial ecotoxicological impact category in LCIA. The specific objectives are to: 1) adapt the framework to develop new EC50 for organics other than PCP; 2) test whether the framework can derive ecotoxicity quality criteria (EQC) such as HC50EC50 and 3) test whether the framework can derive new terrestrial effect data for an inorganic (Zn). CFs will be calculated based on the new effect data, and the new CFs will be integrated and operationalized in IMPACT World+ through case studies. In the long term, the research will make it possible to better assess the characterization of the terrestrial ecotoxicological impact by providing new CFs for substances that currently have none.