Life- cycle assessment in pesticide product development: methods and case study on two plant-growth regulators from different product generations.

Environmental assessments in pesticide product development are generally restricted to plant uptake and emissions of active ingredients. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) enables a more comprehensive evaluation by additionally assessing the impacts of pesticide production and application (e.g. tractor operations). The use of LCA in the product development of pesticides, in addition to the methods commonly applied, is therefore advisable. In this paper a procedure for conducting LCA in early phases of product development is proposed. In a case study, two plant-growth regulators from different product generations were compared regarding their application in intensive production of winter wheat. The results showed thatthe reduced emissions from active ingredients of the newer pesticide were compensated by higher impacts from the production process. The authors draw the conclusion that it is important to consider environmental objectives in the procurement of precursors, in addition to the classical goals of increasing the efficacy and reducing the nontarget effects of pesticides. Moreover, the case study showed that decisions based on uncertain results in early stages of product development may need to be revised in later stages, e.g. based on investigations of pesticides' effects on crop yield.

Variability assessment of groundwater exposure to pesticides and its consideration in life-cycle assessment.

Pesticide leaching from agricultural fields to groundwater is an environmentally relevant and highly variable process. In the present paper, leaching scenarios typical in European agriculture are defined. These scenarios consider important sources of pesticide leaching variability, namely site factors, farming practice, and substance properties. The logic-tree method was used to structure these scenarios. For each scenario, leached fractions of pesticide applied in agriculture were calculated with data and models used in the registration process of the European Union (EU). Contributions of all parameters to variability were calculated for 11 pesticides. Substance properties (Koc and DT50,soil) contributed the mostto variability, followed by site, weather, season of application, crop, and macropore flow. The results of the variability assessment may be directly applied in policy making or they may be used in the environmental assessment of pesticides, e.g. with the life-cycle assessment (LCA) method. Several approaches are suggested for howthe variability assessment presented in this paper may be incorporated in LCA. The application of these approaches is illustrated by a case study on atrazine.

Determination of trace elements in wines and classification according to their provenance.

Provenance and authenticity of wines can be recognized on the basis of typical mineral and trace element patterns by means of chemometric methods. Therefore analytical methods were developed for the determination of As, Be, Co, Cs, Ga, Li, Nb, Ni, Rb, Te, Ti, W, Y, and Zr as well as Mo, Cd, Sb, Tl, U, and the rare earth elements in wines by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). For low risk of contamination or loss of analyte as well as depletion of sample amount and an easy sample pretreatment, direct measurement of diluted wines was studied. The accuracy of the analytical results was proven by recovery experiments by method comparison with standard addition methods and measurement of digested wines. In addition to applying statistical methods for characterizing the precision of the methods, the uncertainty of the measurements was estimated. Results for the elements mentioned above and additional 16 elements (Al, B, Ba, Ca, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mn, Mg, P, Pb, Si, Sn, Sr, V, and Zn) were evaluated by data analytical methods. Due to a specific choice of the analytes for multivariate statistical investigation a prediction rate by cross validation of 88.6% could be achieved.