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Wasn’t it Confucius who said: “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop”. By organizing the first “International Conference on Deriving Environmental Quality Standards for the Protection of Aquatic Ecosystems (EQSPAE, 2011), Hong Kong University and SETAC set the first step for a process aiming to provide a platform for international, regional and local experts from governments, academia and the environmental sector to share their knowledge and expertise on the advancement on the scientific derivation of EQ benchmarks for the protection for aquatic ecosystems and human health.

 

The EQSPAE 2011 event attracted around 80 people (36 platform presentations; 40 poster discussions) from several countries such as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom and United States.

ARCHE was quite active at the meeting by presenting (Marnix) a  talk on ‘Derivation of site-specific EQS for Ni in sediments’ and two posters (Patrick) on ‘Biomet’ and ‘Tiered approach for setting EQS for metals’). After the presentations, break-out sessions were organized on the setting of EQS guidelines for water, sediment and biota for Asian countries. Marnix and Patrick, participated to the sediment EQS session, and the water EQS session, respectively bringing in particular the European expertise on the subjects into the equation. The results of the discussion session will be published as synthesis papers in the international journal ‘Integrated Environmental Management and Assessment’ in 2012. So stay tuned at this website for further news of our efforts in this topic.

Keep track of our latest news

  • New Soil PNEC calculator is available!

    A new updated version of the soil PNEC calculator is available for download on our website. Apart from a new layout, this new version now also includes data for Co and Mo. All calculations are now based on the data and methods selected for the EU REACH dossiers (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals; Regulation EC No 1907/2006) for Cu, Ni, Zn, Pb, Cd, Mo and Co, as available in August 2012."

     

    UPDATED SOIL PNEC CALCULATOR

  • From Soil screening values to Metal Clean-up values

    Dr. Koen Oorts (ARCHE) is invited by the North American Metals Council (NAMC) to actively participate in a workshop on "Ecological Soil Levels-Next Steps in the Development of Metal Clean-up Values"  scheduled for September 17-20, 2012 in Utah. The workshop's main goal is to provide regulators with the methods and processes developed over the last ten years to move from soil screening values to clean-up values.

  • SPERC tool for metals is updated!

    The first version of the metal SPERCs was published in 2010 for the purpose of the 2010 REACH registration deadline and underwent a review process conducted by Lüskow et al. (2011) on behalf of the Federal Environment Agency of Germany (UBA). The second version of the metal SPERCs were improved based on the recommendations by Lüskow et al. (2011) and Tolls et al. (in press) and were further updated with new data for the purpose of the 2013 REACH registration deadline.  This second version is currently undergoing a scientific review process but can already been find on this website.

     

    UPDATED SPERC TOOL

  • Our QSARCHE model is released

    Vertebrate testing under REACH is discouraged by promoting use of alternative non-testing approaches such as QSARs (Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships). Many QSARs are available, however, robust REACH compliant QSARs predicting chronic ecotoxicity to fish are largely lacking. ARCHE filled this data gap by the release of its QSARCHE fish toxicity model. Click to the right to read on.

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