This methodological guide is intended for enterprises and, on the whole, for all AiiDA users. It will help users get acquainted with the ecotoxicological data that is provided by the AiiDA tool and acknowledge its limits. This guide summarizes the hypotheses, the choices, the steps and the methods that have been adopted during the development of the database, from the required calculation to the traceability.

French Guide

English Guide

In the last decade, several Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods for assessing impact of products on living resources have been developed. Beyond the quantified assessments of impacts on living systems, it also checked the feasibility of the impact assessment on human health and ecosystems quality and helps to identify the limits of such methods. Among the different impact categories, that of toxic substances on ecosystems occupies an important place. The extent of these impacts has been stressed on many occasions and the necessity of preserving ecological areas and biodiversity has become a major issue on an international level. By focusing on aquatic ecosystems, this thesis aims at identifying constraints connected with assessment of the impact of chemical substances on ecosystems in LCA and setting up a method for assessing impacts of toxic substances on aquatic ecosystems which meets the requirements of a comparative approach like Life Cycle Assessment. The overall purpose of the thesis is to propose a comparative method for the Life Cycle Impact Assessment of toxics on aquatic ecosystems.

With that aim, the dissertation is going throughout 6 major issues:

1. The feasibility of the comparative impact assessment on ecosystems and the identification of associated constraints.
2. The development of a statistical method for comparing impact on ecosystems;
3. The review of the data availability for calculation of Effect Factors.
4. The choice of the most relevant ecotoxicity measure (ECxs, NOECs and LOECs) for a comparative purpose.
5. The development of best-estimate extrapolation factors for assessing chronic effects based on acute data.
6. The analysis of the ecological realism of the comparative assessment method.