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依赖于特定物质的表征因子（CF）来表示该物质对健康和环境影响的相对贡献。在生命周期评估中，有关污染物排放对土壤的影响的特征仍然很差，仍然必须解决一些挑战。其中一个挑战是，由于缺乏陆地生态毒理学效应数据，使用默认土壤-水分配系数（Kd）外推的水生生态毒理学数据（EC 50）进行有偏见的陆地效应建模。一些污染物的外推方法被认为是如此不确定，没有计算CF。这是令人担忧的，因为缺乏表征因素可能会被解释为缺乏陆地生态毒理学影响的决策过程中驱动的LCA。因此，需要编制新的陆地效应数据，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，改进生态毒理学影响的定性。这些新的数据将通过调整和改进我们实验室开发的五氯苯酚（PCP）的成本效益高的方法来产生，该方法已被证明可以产生陆地生物多样性指标，这些指标具有高度代表性，使用PCR变性梯度凝胶电泳（DGGE）技术和计算生态物种多样性指数。计算CF所需的EC 50从这些多样性指数获得。由于土壤微生物群落是本土生物，不是在实验室中生长，并由数千个相互作用的物种，不同的生态位和代谢潜力，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改进新的框架，以得出土壤微生物生物多样性指标，并产生新的土壤门效应数据（EC 50），以便更好地评估LCIA中陆地生态毒理学影响类别的可靠性。具体目标是：1）调整该框架，以确定五氯苯酚以外的有机物的新的EC 50; 2）测试该框架是否可以得出生态毒性质量标准（EQC），如HC 50 EC 50; 3）测试该框架是否可以得出无机物（锌）的新的陆地效应数据。将根据新的效应数据计算合作框架，并通过案例研究将新的合作框架纳入IMPACT World+并付诸实施。从长远来看，这项研究将为目前没有的物质提供新的CF，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.