Ecotoxicological assessment of organic wastes spread on land: Towards a proposal of a suitable test battery

• Combining terrestrial/ aquatic tests to assess environmental hazard of organic wastes
• Lack of effect of tested organic wastes at recommended application rate
• Higher sensitivity and suitability of terrestrial tests compared with aquatic tests
• Proposal of relevant terrestrial tests on the basis of multivariate analyzes

The land spreading of organic wastes in agriculture is a common practice in Europe, under the regulation of the Directive 86/278/EEC. One of the objectives of this Directive is to prevent harmful effects of organic wastes on soil, plants and animals. Despite this regulatory framework, there is still a lack of harmonized ecotoxicological test strategy to assess the environmental hazard of such wastes.The aim of this study was to provide a first step towards the a priori ecotoxicological assessment of organic wastes before their land use. For that purpose, nine different organic wastes were assessed using direct (i.e. terrestrial tests) and indirect (i.e. tests on water eluates) approaches, for a total of thirteen endpoints. Then, multivariate analyzes were used to discriminate the most relevant test strategy, among the application rates and bioassays used.From our results, a draft of test strategy was proposed, using terrestrial bioassays (i.e. earthworms and plants) and a concentration range between one and ten times the recommended application rates of organic wastes.