Category Archives: Awards

“An innovative water project demonstrating commitment to the local community and to the environment, showing the industry going above and beyond what is required.”

Drogas Vigo, a chemical company based in Spain and Portugal, is the winner of ESIG’s (European Solvent Industry Group) 6th Product Stewardship Award, designed to reward best practices in the safe use and handling of solvents.
The Award ceremony took place in the framework of Cefic’s Responsible Care Forum in Paris 26 october 2007.

Drogas Vigo was selected on 21 September by an independent jury of senior representatives from the European Commission, the European Parliament, the media and trade associations. The jury faced a challenging task due to the high quality of entries. This year’s selection was marked by the strong participation of Eastern European countries, which accounted for almost 30% of the total number of applications.

The jury was unanimously impressed by the strategic plan implemented by the Drogas Vigo company over the last six years. It led to the construction of a highly advanced solvents recycling unit, the use of cryogenic technology to reduce emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC), and the improvement of health, safety, security and environmental standards at storage sites and at customer side.

Dr Roman Ashauer, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (EAWAG), received the 2007 LRI Innovation Science Award to carry out research on “Improving the definition of water quality criteria: linking organism recovery times to mechanism of action and acute-to-chronic ratios”.

Roman Ashauer recently obtained his PhD from the University of York. His work on “Predicting effects of fluctuating or pulsed exposure to pesticides on aquatic organisms” was undertaken at the EcoChemistry research team, a joint University of York/Central Science Laboratory, under the supervision of Professor Colin Brown.

His PhD research resulted in five first author peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Ashauer is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Environmental Toxicology group lead by Dr. Beate Escher, where the LRI sponsored work will be carried out.

“Improving the definition of water quality criteria: linking organism recovery times to mechanism of action and acute-to-chronic ratios”.

The proposed project systematically investigates a novel approach to aquatic ecotoxicology which is based on measuring and simulating toxic processes during a length of time. It applies the mechanistic understanding of toxic effects on aquatic organisms to develop a process-based interpretation of acute-to-chronic (ACR) datasets.

Furthermore, this research will establish a better understanding of organism recovery after exposure to different chemicals and the relation of recovery to mechanisms of action (MEoA). The relationship between acute toxicity and chronic effects will also be studied. Ultimately, this study will inform risk assessment and facilitate the definition of water quality criteria based on evidence about the time-course of toxic effects (ACR) and mechanistic information (MEoA).

It is expected that by including the dimension of time, the mechanistic understanding of toxic processes could be used on quantitative tools (TK-TD models), which can be directly applied for risk assessment purposes.

Based on the proposed research it will be possible to calculate organism recovery times, predict effects from fluctuating or sequential pulsed exposure and develop novel types of QSARs as well as improve the definition of water quality criteria.